Awards

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Sammy Weaver shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets

Black and white photo of Sammy Weaver, a white woman with long hair. She is looking away from the camera and light is coming onto her fact from the right hand side.

Congratulations to Seren poet Sammy Weaver whose pamphlet Angola, America has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets.

The Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets recognises an outstanding poetry pamphlet published in the UK. The winner of the 2023 award will be announced at the award ceremony on Wednesday 13th December.

To find out more about the Michael Marks award and this year’s shortlist, visit their website.

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Paul Henry wins the English Language Poetry Category at Wales Book of the Year 2023

Left: Paul Henry. Right: Image of the cover of As If To Sing

Congratulations to Paul Henry who won the English Language Poetry Category at Wales Book of the Year 2023 for his collection As If To Sing.

As If To Sing is Paul Henry’s eleventh collection. The power of song to sustain the human spirit resonates through the collection, which is rich in the musical lyricism admired by Paul’s readers and fellow poets. An essential addition to his compelling body of work, it is a deserved winner of this year’s Poetry Category award.

Wales Book of the Year is run by Literature Wales, and celebrates outstanding literary talent from Wales across many genres and in both English and Welsh. There are four categories in each language – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-fiction and Children & Young People, with one of the four category winners announced as the Overall Winner, and claiming the title Wales Book of the Year. This year the overall award went to Caryl Lewis for her novel Drift.

You can view the full list of winners from all categories in both language on the Literature Wales website.

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Friday Poem – ‘Hide and Seek’ by Hannah Hodgson

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Hide and Seek’ by Hannah Hodgson from her debut collection 163 Days which was recently longlisted for the Barbellion Prize.

This cover shows a photo of artist Sue Austin floating underwater in her wheelchair over a bed of yellow coral. The text reads: 163 Days. Hannah Hodgson.

In her debut collection 163 Days Hannah Hodgson uses a panoply of medical, legal, and personal vocabularies to explore what illness, death and dying does to a person as both patient and witness. In her long poem ‘163 Days’, her longest period of hospitalisation to date, she probes various truths which clash like a tray of dropped instruments in a silent operating theatre. The mundanity of hospital life is marbled by a changing landscape of mood, hope and loss. A gap yawns between the person she is, and the person in her medical notes. In ‘Aftercare’, Hannah navigates the worlds of both nightclubs and hospice care as she embarks on a new version of her life as a disabled adult. An important collection, in which Hodgson’s true voice takes poetry into difficult places.

Hide and Seek My mother learns I’m in trouble when a nurse says Resus like it rhymes with Dr Seuss. Re-seuss. He turns the monitor away from me. My body writing a tell-all-book, the hospital needs to protect me from. I can feel my heart blinking on that screen, flickering as my cursor. The machine keeps alerting the staff towards my apparent death. I’m too shallow to be captured. The doctor spends fifteen minutes trying to get a cannular into one of the branches inside my arm. How many times does a blood pressure cuff need to confirm my consciousness? How many times do I need to tell my mother which of my documents to burn?

163 Days is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘We are coming’ by Kim Moore

Earlier this week, Kim Moore was announced the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022. This week’s Friday Poem is ‘We are coming’ from her wining collection All The Men I Never Married. You can hear Kim chatting in-depth about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a collage of a male figure made up of tiny images of nature. The figure is surrounded by butterflies which stand out against the black background. The text reads All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore. Winner of the Forward Prize.

Pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire, All The Men I Never Married is Kim Moore’s award-winning and critically acclaimed second collection. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. She turns the spotlight on interactions between men and women, revealing easy misogyny, everyday sexism and uncomfortable truths about the challenges women face on a daily basis.

We are coming under cover of darkness, with our strawberry marks, our familiars, our third nipples, our ill-mannered bodies, our childhoods spent hobbled like horses where we were told to keep our legs closed, where we sat in the light of a window and posed and waited for the makers of the world to tell us again how a woman is made. We are arriving from the narrow places, from the spaces we were given, with our curses and our spells and our solitude, with our potions we swallow to shrink us small as insects or stretch us into giants, for yes, there are giants amongst us, we must warn you. There will be riots, we’re carrying all that we know about silence as we return from the forests and towers, unmaking ourselves, stepping from the pages of books, from the eye of the camera, from the cages we built for each other, the frames of paintings, from every place we were lost and afraid in. We stand at the base of our own spines and watch tree turn to bone and climb each vertebra to crawl back into our minds, we’ve been out of our minds all this time, our bodies saying no, we were not born for this, dragging the snare and the wire behind us.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Listen to our in-depth interview with Kim about All The Men I Never Married in episode 9 which is available now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website for £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

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Friday Poem – ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Iraqi Bride in Transit’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile which has just been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year!

Cardiff-based poet Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the “holders of these stories”, the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son’s death.

Iraqi Bride in Transit She’s nineteen, waits in Charles de Gaulle airport unsure where to go. She hopes that Groom comes for her soon. Her first experience of a plane journey hasn’t been Oh là là. Far from her Baghdad home, her white suit is not so white now. It’s the first time she wears high heels; she has blisters, struggles to balance. She wears her mother’s fur coat, a white headscarf, white clutch bag holds her green passport. Feels bare without her abaya. Groom waits in Heathrow arrivals. It’s 23rd December 1974. Three flights have arrived from Paris in the last eight hours. No sign of her. Iraqi Christians who boarded the same plane from Baghdad waiting for their New York flight recognise she’s the bride, take her to the gate. Last flight before Christmas. He is pupil. He do drugs. She rolls her Rs. Groom’s lost hope. It’s late. He gets up, ready to leave Heathrow, gathers coins to make the international call. What will he tell her father? Announcement. Groom is summoned to Immigration. Your wife says you do drugs. He realises at that moment he should have taught his bride the correct English term for pharmacy student.

Inhale/Exile is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Voting is now open for the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. Head to the Wales Arts Review website to vote for your favorite www.walesartsreview.org.

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Friday Poem – From ‘You’ by John Haynes

With Valentine’s Day on the 14th February, this week’s Friday Poem is taken from the long-poem You by Costa-Award winning poet John Haynes.

You is a book-length poem by the late poet John Haynes. The ‘You’ of the title is the narrator’s partner and wife of many years. The book is not just a celebration of, and meditation on, personal love and devotion, but a record of how such love moves out of a family and is refracted out into the community and the wider world. The tensions inherent in this are compounded by the cross-cultural nature of the union. The narrator is a white British man and his wife was born and raised in Nigeria. Exploring a partnership based on culturally quite different – and in some aspects painfully incompatible –conceptions of ‘love’, the poem  is knit together by philosophical themes of ‘I’ and ‘you’ seen from many perspectives. Shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize.

that they flew back across the whole Sahara sleeping on the wing, as you begin to now, with those small sounds, back to Kagoma – that house where I met your mother in her starched tall headtie and her Dutch wax print and just a little shy to meet your White Man, but so glad with wrinkles smiling tight – just as I bend across you, turn the lamp off, draw the curtains, thinking with what skill I managed it on that rickety camp bed, making love with not the faintest squeal or crunk of springs. Like press-ups, I recall, rugby-fit then, mouth open while I howled into the dark not letting out a sound, or that night, at the dam, when we made love, remember, there beside the road, half in the car half out, with confidence enough to dare the world to drive towards us, then with full light on, and nights at Number Ten, insane with flesh, and resurrected new again each time as neither I nor you.

You is available on the Seren website: £8.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Weaving with Rushes’ by Sarah Wimbush

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Weaving with Rushes’ by Sarah Wimbush from her debut pamphlet Bloodlines which has just been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2020.

Bloodlines is an exploration of Sarah Wimbush’s own Gypsy/Traveller heritage, a journey made by piecing together fragments of distant stories and a scattered language. Along the way, we meet people who are ‘tethered to the seasons’; voices that reverberate with a sense of family and resilience, and always with that constant wonder of being part of something colourful, untamed and rare.

“A thrilling debut…” – Daljit Nagra

Bloodlines is available on the Seren website: £5.00

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Enjoy this filmpoem of Sarah reading the pamphlet’s title poem ‘Bloodlines’. Film made by Isobel Turner.

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Friday Poem – ‘Secret Reverse’ by Zoë Skoulding

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Secret Reverse’ by Zoë Skoulding from her collection Footnotes to Water which recently won the poetry category in Wales Book of the Year 2020.

In Footnotes to Water Zoë Skoulding follows two forgotten rivers, the Adda in Bangor and the Bièvre in Paris, and tracks the literary hoofprints of sheep through Welsh mountains. In these journeys she reveals urban and rural locales as sites of lively interconnection, exploring different senses of community, and the ways in which place shapes and is shaped by language.

 

Footnotes to Water is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

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Zoë Skoulding wins the Poetry category in Wales Book of the Year 2020

We are delighted that Zoë Skoulding and her collection Footnotes to Water have won the poetry category in the Wales Book of the Year 2020.

In Footnotes to Water Zoë Skoulding follows two forgotten rivers, the Adda in Bangor and the Bièvre in Paris, and tracks the literary hoofprints of sheep through Welsh mountains. In these journeys she reveals urban and rural locales as sites of lively interconnection, exploring different senses of community, and the ways in which place shapes and is shaped by language.

 

Zoë was shortlisted for the award alongside two other titles, Erato by Deryn Rees-Jones and Fur Coats in Tahiti by Jeremy Over (Carcanet). The English-language winners were announced in a special awards programme on 31 July hosted by Nicola Heywood Thomas and broadcast on BBC Radio Wales.

Speaking about her win, Zoë said: “I’m delighted by this award, especially as Footnotes to Water is in conversation with Wales in all sorts of ways. Some of the poems grew out of dialogues with artists Ben Stammers and Miranda Whall, whose work explores Welsh landscapes through visual and performance art, while my own thinking about place and its relationships developed while I was editing Poetry Wales. I’m also glad that this award – and the shortlist – recognises the excellent work done by Seren Books in sustaining English-language poetry’s role in Wales’s cultural life.”

Amy Wack, poetry editor at Seren added: “Zoë Skoulding’s wonderfully inventive and subtly musical work remains both challenging and delightful, so pleased she has won this prize.” Lleucu Siencyn, CEO of Literature Wales, also commented that Zoë’s work “always feels fresh and new.”

The winner of English-language Book of the Year was Niall Griffiths with his novel Broken Ghost (Jonathan Cape) and Babel by Ifan Morgan Jones (Y Lolfa) was the overall winner of the Welsh-language award.

Speaking about the awards, Lleucu Siencyn said: “Wales Book of the Year is one of the highlights of our cultural calendar, and this year more than ever we are extremely pleased to be able to continue to shine a light on our incredible literary talents. Literature helps to guide us through our darkest hours, as well as bringing joy and hope to readers of all ages. Wales consistently produces excellent writers, and this Award is testament to this each year. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!”

Wales Book of the Year is an annual award hosted by Literature Wales. Other categories include Fiction, Creative Non-fiction and, new for this year, Children and Young People. You can see the full list of winners in both Welsh and English on the Literature Wales website.

 

Footnotes to Water is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Watch Zoë reading alongside the other two shortlisted poets at our online WBOTY Poetry Shortlist Reading which is now available on our Youtube channel. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dVT-NARt5k]

 

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Maria Donovan; Long-lists, first lines and ‘The Chicken Soup Murder’

41POingnfmL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_We’re incredibly pleased to hear that Maria Donovan has been long-listed for the Hall & Woodhouse DLF Local Writing Prize for her book The Chicken Soup Murder. It’s a huge achievement considering this year the DLF received over 70 entries, and we’re all crossing our fingers for the next round!

You can purchase a copy of Donovan’s thrilling and genre-transcendent debut novel here: The Chicken Soup Murder

Donovan has been busy lately, and has recently been interviewed by novelist Shauna Gilligan for her Writer’s Chat Series. To read the two discussing breaking down genres, developing complex and sympathetic characters and to hear about Donovan’s upcoming plans, follow the link here: Donovan’s Interview