Simon appleby, Author at Seren

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Simon appleby

Terroir by Graham Mort longlisted for Edge Hill Prize 2016

Congratulations to Graham Mort, whose short story collection Terroir has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in its tenth anniversary year.
This is the second time Graham has had a collection on the Edge Hill Prize list – Touch went on to win the prize in 2011.
Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction and organiser of the Short Story Prize said: ‘We are excited to be able to mark the tenth anniversary of our prize with such a strong longlist of authors from across the UK and Ireland. It is fitting that in our anniversary year a previous winner features in the list – Graham Mort (Winner 2011) – as well as two previously shortlisted authors – Helen Simpson and Ali Smith. We face a tough task in the judging stages, but our tenth anniversary prize will truly showcase some of the best talent in the genre.’
See the full longlist here.
About Terroir:From England to Europe, Africa to South America, these stories from prize-winning short story writer Graham Mort explore relationships: father and child; man and wife; man and his environment.
A rising star of wine making understands his terroir, but oversteps the boundaries; a father taking his son on a day out finds himself in unexpectedly terrifying circumstances; an aid worker in Uganda finds himself treading in his father’s footsteps…
All these stories are sensitively told and beautifully written, bringing fresh perspectives to our place in the world around us.
About the Edge Hill Short Story Prize:The Edge Hill Short Story Prize it is the only UK award that recognises excellence in a published collection of short stories and has attracted established names competing alongside relative newcomers for the £10,000 main prize, a £1,000 Readers’ Prize and an additional category worth £500 acknowledging rising talents on Edge Hill University’s own MA Creative Writing course.

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Simon appleby

International Women’s Day: celebrating Seren’s female fiction writers

International Women’s Day 2016 has arrived. We celebrate this year by highlighting just a few of the talented women we’ve been fortunate enough to publish. There will always be more names to mention and more works to appreciate, and you can find countless gorgeous books written by women on our website. But none-the-less, we hope you enjoy hearing about just a few of the Seren women writers and their achievements.

In this second International Women’s Day blog post, Fiction Editor Penny Thomas highlights just a few of the novels and short story collections by women we have published over the years. Penny has a talent for finding gorgeously written fiction, much of which is written by female authors.

Penny: Over the past few years at Seren we’ve had the pleasure to publish many wonderful women fiction writers from Leonora Brito to Sian James, from Francesca Rhydderch to Jo Mazelis. In the last few years alone we have published novels, short stories and novellas by dozens of women authors, writing stories set around the globe – from WW2 Hong Kong, to the US, the Irish borders, northern France, or Patagonia, or closer to home by the River Severn, Newport Pembs, Tonypandy or Swansea, not to mention exploring the mysteries of the Mabinogion. All have fresh voices, varied and vital writing styles and something to say about their world.

Francesca Rhydderch’s debut novel The Rice Paper Diaries was Wales fiction book of the year in 2014 and has since published in China too. Based on the experiences of her great aunt, it explores the life of a west Wales girl, travelling as a young bride to the expat community of Hong Kong in 1940, just before the Japanese invaded.

The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick is a collection of nineteen stories, many set on the Irish border. These stories explore states of liminality: life on the Irish border, dual identities, emigration, being between states – certainty and doubt, codependency and freedom. Some explore themes of catastrophe and constraint. All explore what it means to be alive in a fraught and ever-changing world. This first collection from prizewinning author and playwright, Jaki McCarrick explores the dark side of human nature, often with a postmodern ‘Ulster gothic’ twist.

Star-Shot by Mary-Ann Constantine is a modern-day fable and gives us a network of lonely souls set around Cardiff museum, finding strength in their unlikely relationships with each other to fight the silences invading the city.

Six Pounds Eight Ounces by Rhian Elizabeth brings us Hannah King, the ‘honest’ account of a Rhondda girl who may or may not have lied her way through her schooldays, swapping Barbies and books for Glam Rock and glitter.

Sugar Hall, a ghost story by Tiffany Murray delves deep into the red mud and murky colonial past of a crumbling post-war mansion on the edges of the River Severn and the secrets it holds.

Love and Fallout by Kathryn Simmonds combines the female relationships at the 1980s’ Greenham Common anti-nuclear camp with a modern day tale of mother and daughter relationships to great effect.

Dark Mermaids by Anne Lauppe Dunbar dives into East German noir with the tale of former child GDR swimmer Sophia, called upon to investigate the doping horrors of her own forgotten past.

Swimming on Dry Land by Helen Blackhurst tells the tale of the Harvey family, uprooted to Australia in a search for paradise, but finding themselves adrift in an alien landscape.

Our female fiction authors have also won awards for their writing.

Significance by Jo Mazelis
£9.99
Winner of a 2015 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered award, Significance is ‘feminist, Francophile, urban noir’ focusing on the murder of Lucy Swann and the ripples this event stirs in the lives of all in her vicinity.

American Sycamore by Karen Fielding
£9.99
American Sycamore takes us into the lives of congenial American fly-fisherman Billy and his younger sister Alice as they meander alongside the Susquehanna River in an offbeat coming-of-age novel of death, madness and fishing. Gold winner in the Mid-Atlantic Best Regional Fiction category of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award.

2016 will be another exciting year for fiction published by women writers, with Jo Mazelis’ haunting new short story collection Ritual, 1969 arriving in April (now available to pre-order), Bethany W. Pope’s Masque (a richly gothic retelling of The Phantom of the Opera) in June, and other delights later in the year.

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Simon appleby

International Women’s Day: celebrating Seren’s female poets

In this blog post, the first of two, we focus on the Seren female poets. Poetry Editor Amy Wack has been with us at Seren for over twenty years, publishing countless collections by women. The gender balance of most UK publishers favours men but in our case, with Amy at the helm, the balance is far more even.

Amy: Seren has a very good record for promoting, and bringing forth women writers and we owe this both to the Seren Board, and the forward-looking people at the Welsh Books Council, as well as the skill of my co-commissioner: Fiction Editor at Seren, Penny Thomas.

Women’s Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack
March 2016, £14.99
Featuring over 100 poets, Women’s Work: Women Poets Writing in English, has been re-printed. The 2016 edition features a revised introduction and updated author biographies.
Women’s Work contains classic poems by famous poets as well as lesser-known works. Editor Eva Salzman has provided an opening essay that artfully picks apart the statistics involving women’s work in anthologies and points out, with her characteristically vigorous wit, just who gets to choose the canon, and why. Along with co-Editor Amy Wack (Seren poetry editor), they’ve both ranged broadly over the English-speaking world, and aimed to represent women of colour as well as those from the more esoteric wings of the style spectrum.

Poets published by Seren included in Women’s Work:

Kate Bingham
Jean Earle
Carrie Etter
Catherine Fisher
Hilary Menos
Deryn Rees-Jones
Vuylwa Carlin
Pascale Petit
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Anne-Marie Fyfe
Kathryn Gray
Siobhan Campbell
Kathryn Maris
Anne Cluysenaar
Hilary Llewellyn-Williams
Tamar Yoseloff
Kathryn Simmonds
Zoe Skoulding
Christine Evans
Sarah Corbett
Carol Rumens

Collections published in the last few years include Kim Moore’s critically acclaimed debut The Art of Falling, Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems, Rosie Shepperd’s The Man at the Corner Table, and Katherine Stansfield’s debut, Playing House.

Hot off the press, we have Crowd Sensations by Judy Brown, which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Lynne Hjelmgaard’s A Boat Called Annalise, which recalls a journey the author took with her late husband on a sailboat, to the Caribbean and back.

You can look forward to many more collections by female poets, and on the horizon we have Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition winner The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels by Ilse Pedler (available to pre-order), Katrina Naomi’s hard-hitting The Way the Crocodile Taught Me (April), and Animal People by Carol Rumens (April).

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Different Water

Happy Friday one and all. This week’s Friday Poem is an exploration of the significance and power of motherhood, taken from Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s collection, Boom!, as a little early celebration of Mother’s Day this coming Sunday.

‘Becoming a mother changed me in every single way,’ says the author, ‘my first child – born in October 2006 – just about knocked me sideways. There were many reasons for this, but here’s the biggest one: I could not believe how public and political the (hugely personal) experience of motherhood was.’

Jess-Cooke found, as many parents do, that the juggling act required to raise young children and continue a professional and creative life, is both exhausting and fulfilling. Viewing motherhood from a multiplicity of artful angles, the author says, ‘Coupled with all this was the love I had for my children. It completely and utterly blew me away, how much I could love another human being.’

Different Water

When a girl becomes a mother there is no fanfare.
No government re-elections, no erupting volcanoes.
The baby mops up the praise. But quietly
there are earthquakes, realigning planets.
When you ask to hold her newborn you are
addressing someone who just became a tiger,
so be careful.When she soothes the child that has
shrieked for three hours she is the Matador,
sunlit with relief. Sometimes, at around 2am,
she is the only woman ever to have given birth.
At the supermarket she is a calm strong oak
dragging a thrashing child past the strawberries.
At the school gates she’s autumn weeping leaves
of every hue for the loss of summer. Often
she spies the girl she once was and thinks, wimp.
Like grass trees after fire, like crops in new weather,
like a river clasping different water, there is
no fanfare when a girl becomes a mother.

Buy your copy here.

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Simon appleby

Happy St David’s Day 2016

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! Happy St David’s Day to one and all.

This is a day to celebrate Welshness, so that means warm Welsh cakes, bunches of fresh daffodils and one or two good Welsh books to read.

Why not celebrate this St David’s Day by investing in a new book published by one of the fabulous Welsh publishers? Visit your local bookshop or gwales.com to see the great selection of Welsh books out there.

Want to know more about our Welsh publishing friends? Read a little about each of them below.

Parthian’s long list of gorgeous titles include Rebecca F. John’s award-winning short story collection Clown’s Shoes.

Firefly Press have loads of great children’s books including Branford Boase-longlisted Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot.

Honno has a well-deserved reputation for publishing some of the best women’s literature in Wales.

Gwasg Carreg Gwalch publishes an astounding range of Welsh interest books for adults, children and visitors to Wales in both Welsh and English language.

Cinnamon are an innovative press, publishing fiction, poetry and non-fiction books, not defined by genre but by their ability to be thought-provoking and to say something new.

Gomer is the oldest publisher still running in Wales and publishes across the board with children’s titles, plays, poetry, bilingual books and more.

Graffeg have produced and published over 100 illustrated books since 2003, with titles about food, arts, culture, heritage and architecture, gardens, landscapes, photography, sport and lifestyle.

Y Lolfa started out as unofficial printers to the new, activist Welsh Language Society in the ’60s, and have evolved to produce an ever-widening range of popular books in both Welsh and English.

University of Wales Press publishes around 70 new books and journals a year, primarily in the fields of European studies, philosophy, literature, history, Welsh and Celtic studies.

And lastly there’s us here at Seren, bringing new poetry, fiction and non-fiction to you each year. From our list we suggest Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize-winner Significance, Man Booker Prize-longlisted The Last Hundred Days or Costa Poetry Award-winner My Family and Other Superheroes for some extra-special St David’s Day reading.

There is an astounding amount of literature produced in Wales each year, everything from fiction, to guide books, to scholarly material. We hope you find a new book to fall in love with this St David’s Day. Support Welsh publishing, because #WelshBooksMatter.

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – Elterwater Rain

This week our Friday Poem is taken from the brand new, beautiful Crowd Sensations by Judy Brown. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Crowd Sensations is the worthy follow-up to Judy’s Forward Prize-nominated debut, Loudness.

Judy Brown is a poet of vivid contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations. Her titles and first lines draw readers into a poem then often surprise with an unexpected narrative. A key theme in this new collection is the contrast between living in the city and the countryside; her take on landscape is original and characteristically unnerving: ‘Elterwater Rain’, ‘Dove Cottage Ferns’ and ‘One of the Summer People’ reflect on nature and the place of the traveller, the incomer, the tourist.

Elterwater Rain

When I came to write of it there was no rain,
just the last of its ectoplasm shivering
in a pool on the terrace’s lowest slate.

No sky winks in the left-behind liquid,
only the garden table’s black metal underside –
all is prediction, absence, an oracle’s glum vigil –

whilst the air, hyperactive, holds more weather:
weather folded in weather, the rest of the day
remains to be dealt like a deck of wet cards.

Town rain splits and skids but this land accepts
what is given. Foliage moves against foliage;
water drains down the conifers’ inner ladders.

Something thirsts for each substance spilled
but this liquid is neighbourly, a local’s drink.
Outside Ambleside’s tourist shops, dog-bowls

brim with downpour. Here the last shower
hangs about too, old drops slung like bats
from the bird-feeder and the patio chairs.

Buy your copy now.

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Simon appleby

Jaki McCarrick in The Irish Times: the success of the Irish Short Story

Read Jaki McCarrick’s article in The Irish Times, where she asks: what is the story behind the success of the Irish Short Story?
Irish writers have excelled at the short story. But is it due, asks writer Jaki McCarrick, to the Irish oral tradition, Catholicism’s drama, an acute sense of place, an accident of history or because writing is the last free art?
Jaki’s critically acclaimed short story collection The Scattering was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, 2014.
The Scattering is a collection of nineteen stories, many set on the Irish border, where this London-born author currently lives. These stories explore states of liminality: life on the Irish border, dual identities, emigration, being between states – certainty and doubt, codependency and freedom. Some explore themes of catastrophe and constraint. All explore what it means to be alive in a fraught and ever-changing world. This first collection from prizewinning author and playwright, Jaki McCarrick explores the dark side of human nature, often with a postmodern ‘Ulster gothic’ twist.

Posted on February 22, 2016 by Simon appleby

Siobhán Campbell wins Oxford Brookes Poetry Competition

Congratulations to Siobhan Campbell, who has won First Price in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition’s Open category with ‘Framed’. Siobhan’s most recent poetry collection, Cross Talk, was published by Seren.
Judge’s statement:
‘The standard of the entries for the inaugural Oxford Brookes Poetry Competition was very high – I was spoilt by poems to choose from. Many of them seem to emerge from a broad range of life experiences, and some of the finest had a sense of urgency to them, of needing to be written.
The First Prize winner in the Open category, ‘Framed’, had exactly this sense, of witnessing, or testimony to a very strange course of events, and that is what I loved about it – the range of movement in the story it tells, from Guyana to the docks of England to the Inner Hebrides.’
View the full list of winning poems here.

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Simon appleby

Friday Poem – A Psalm for the Scaffolders

A Psalm for the Scaffolders Kim Moore The Art of Falling

This week’s Friday Poem comes from Kim Moore’s acclaimed debut, The Art of Falling.

These are poems that confront the reader, steeped in realism, they are not designed to soothe or beguile. They are not designed with careful overlays of irony and although frequently clever, they are not pretentious but vigorously alive and often quite funny.

Already a winner of multiple prizes, such as the Northern Promise Award (2014), Moore writes poems that are both moving and memorable.

A Psalm for the Scaffolders

who balanced like tightrope walkers,
who could run up the bracing
faster than you or I could climb
a ladder, who wore red shorts
and worked bare-chested,
who cut their safety vests in half,
a psalm for the scaffolders
and their vans, their steel
toe-capped boots, their coffee mugs,
a psalm for those who learnt
to put up a scaffold standing
on just one board, a psalm
for the scaffolder who could put
a six-inch nail in a piece of wood
with just his palm, a psalm
for those who don’t like rules
or things taking too long, who now
mustn’t go to work uncovered,
who mustn’t cut their safety vests
or climb without ladders, who must
use three boards at all times,
a psalm for the scaffolders
who fall with a harness on,
who have ten minutes to be rescued,
a psalm for the scaffolder who fell
in a clear area, a tube giving way,
that long slow fall, a psalm for him,
who fell thirty feet and survived,
a psalm for the scaffolder
who saw him fall, a psalm for those
at the top of buildings, the wind whistling
in their ears, the sky in their voices,
for those who lift and carry
and shout and swear, for those
who can recite the lengths of boards
and tubes like a song, a psalm for them,
the ones who don’t like heights
but spent their whole life hiding it,
a psalm for those who work too long,
a psalm for my father, a psalm for him.

Buy your copy now.

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Simon appleby

Graham Clifford joins the T-Junction Poetry Festival line-up

Graham Clifford will be at the Teesside International Poetry Festival for the long-running Black Light Engine Room: a night of poetry from special guests, also including Amir Darwish, JK Ihalainen, Mark Robinson, Helianne Kallio, Steve Ely and Julie Hogg. Graham is the author of The Hitting Game and Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize-winning pamphlet Welcome Back to the Country.
T-Junction is a four-day poetry festival of readings, workshops, performances, debates, master-classes, guest-lectures and book-launches in Middlesbrough, running from 14th to 17th April. Find out more on the T-Junction website.

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