Congratulations to Graham Mort who won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011 for the collection Touch (Seren). Mort was unveiled as winner at a special awards ceremony at the Blackwells Bookshop in Charing Cross Road.  Touch is set from the heat of Africa to the warmth of France or the snow bound dales of northern England, the twenty-one stories displayed a deep sensitivity to both the natural world and to human relationships. Among the collection is the 2007 Bridport prize winning story ‘The Prince’.

Although Graham was unable to receive the first prize of £5,000 in person due to commitments to a project working with writers in Uganda he sent a message of thanks saying: “I’m sending this message from Kampala, and the title story, Touch begins here in Uganda and that seemed somehow fitting, my relief at winning was tinged with regret for the other finalists – all of them terrific writers, who also deserved to win. I’m glad that some of them will be picking up other prizes and I’m honoured to be listed among them… I’m sorry not to be at the ceremony, though not sorry to be here in Kampala working with Femrite, a women writers association who represent an emerging generation of Ugandan writers who don’t have this kind of opportunity to publish or win prizes. Their work is pitched at social conditions that they believe can be changed by the insights and understanding that literature creates. Thank you and cheers – have a great evening.”

Graham was born in Lancashire and studied English at Liverpool University. He worked as a mill labourer, dairy operative and psychiatric nurse before training as a teacher. He taught in schools, colleges, prisons, special education and psychiatric units before becoming a freelance writer. He also currently works as Director of Postgraduate Studies for the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. A specialist in distance learning, he also leads the Lancaster University/British Council African writers mentoring scheme, ‘Crossing Borders’.

Ailsa Cox, Co-ordinator of the Prize and Reader in Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill University, said: “The quality of the shortlist was phenomenal this year, with a range of highly acclaimed writers, from both ‘mainstream’ and independent presses such as Graham Mort’s publisher, Seren. Graham’s well-deserved success is a reminder of the high standard of small press publishing in the UK.”

Touch is available to buy at www.serenbooks.com
Graham Mort has a collection of poetry out this autumn with Seren, titled Cusp

Graham Mort scooped the Edge Hill Short Story prize 2011, with his collection Touch. The winner was announced at Blackwells, Charing Cross Road in London. Touch was shortlisted amongst some diverse names such as, Michele Roberts, Polly Samson. Helen Simpson and Tom Vowler. Mort’s collection includes a Bridport prize-winning short story “The Prince”. Graham is currently abroad and was unable to collect his £5,000, Penny Thomas (Fiction Editor at Seren) accepted it on his behalf.
Unfortunately Pascale Petit didn’t win Wales Book of the Year 2011 with her collection of poetry What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo. Pascale was on the shortlist with Cloud Road by John Harrison and Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. Cloud Road (Parthian) won the £10,000 prize and each short-listed author received a £1,000 prize. What the Water Gave Me was on the short list for the T S Eliot Prize 2010.

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was born July 6 1907 and died at the age of 47.

Frida Kahlo led a traumatic life, she contracted Polio at the young age of six, and was seriously injured on a bus after the vehicle collided with a trolley car in 1925. As the result of the accident was a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken robs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot and a dislocated shoulder. Also, an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability. Frida suffered extreme pain for most of the remainder of her life.

In 1929 Frida Kahlo married the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, whose work she admired.

Poet Pascale Petit has a collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo – this collection contains fifty-two poems on the voice of Frida Kahlo. Some are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.  More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of “how art works on the pain spectrum”, laced with splashed of ferocious colour.

Petit’s collection was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2010 and is currently on the shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2011.
A poem from What the Water Gave Me ‘My Birth’:

I swivel my emerging head
so you can recognise me
by my joined-up eyebrows.

My mother’s face is covered
with a sheet, so are her breasts –
they will never feed me.

Through the pink fog, I can see
with these baby painter’s eyes
how bare a room can be,

dominated as ours is by that picture
of the weeping Virgin.
Even my unhappiest paintings

will joyful. Look at how
I wear my mother’s body
like a regional dress –

its collar gripping my neck.
For now, her legs are my arms,
her sex is my necklace.

What the Water Gave Me is available at www.serenbooks.com

Some of the many review received for this wonderful collection:

“Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.” — Jackie Kay, Observer Books of the Year

“Poems about paintings rarely set off fireworks, but this is ekphrasis with a difference: Petit speaks in Kahlo’s voice with eerie believability.” — Time Out

“This arresting ollection… exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint.” — Ruth Padel, Guardian

Two Seren authors have been shortlisted for two prizes – and the winners are to be announced 7th July 2011.
Pascale Petit is shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011 with her poetry collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo. Petit’s latest collection was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize 2010.
Graham Mort is shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011 with Touch, a collection of short stories. This collection includes the Bridport prize-winning story ‘The Prince’, Touch spans twenty years of short-story writing from author and poet Graham Mort.

Wales Book of the Year 2011 Ceremony is taking place on the 7th July 2011 at 7pm Cineworld, Cardiff.
Seren poet Pascle Petit is one of the three authors to be shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011 prize. What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.
Doors open 7pm, close at 7.25pm – ceremony starts promptly at 7.30pm. Literature Wales cannot guarantee admittance after 7.30pm.
www.literaturewales.org

Thursday 23rd June 7.30 – 9.30pm The Bluecoat, Liverpool. Tickets £5/ £4. www.bluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1015
For lovers of Bob Dylan’s music and lyrics, David Wolley and Phil Bowen launch and read their anthology, co-edited with Damian Furniss The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob at Seventy, which includes contributors from Roger McGough, Peter Finch, Allen Ginsberg and themselves.

The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness will be launched on Wednesday 22nd June, 6pm at the Ogilvie Theatre Foyer, St. Anne’s College, Woodstock Road, Oxford. Refreshments. RSVP to Seren 01656 663018 or [email protected]

An intricately plotted literary thriller about Ceausescus last hundred days in power, from an author who was a first-hand witness to the regime – Patrick McGuinness’s accomplished debut novel explores a world of danger, repression and corruption.