We’re delighted to hear that Seren poet Rosalind Hudis, whose collection Restorations was published earlier this year, has been shortlisted for the Gladstone Library Writers in Residence award for 2022.
Every year, Gladstone Library hosts four authors as part of this highly competitive and prestigious award, which is designed to support emerging and established novelists and poets working within a broad spread of literary genres. The award is now in its eleventh year. Every applicant is required to have published a book within the last three years and is asked to write a short piece of writing in which they discuss liberal values.
The 12 shortlisted writers for 2022 are:
Sarah Watling, The Olivier Sisters Carys Bray, When the Lights Go Out Glen James Brown, Ironopolis Rosalind Hudis, Restorations Francesca Haig, The Cookbook of Common Prayer Rebecca Watts, Red Gloves Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins Suji Kwok Kim, Notes from the North Amy Sackville, Painter to the King Alice Jolly, The Aspergers’ Dilemma Caoilinn Hughes, The Wild Laughter Guy Stagg, The Crossway
Winning authors will be offered a residency extending up to a month at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden which is the UK’s only residential library. It has provided quiet and comfortable spaces for writers and researchers for more than a century.
Previous winners of the award include poets Katrina Naomi, (anoter Seren poet and author of Wild Persistence), Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (Harmless Like You), and Angela Topping (Grimm Rules), novelists Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent, Essex Girls) and Jessie Burton (The Miniaturist), and nonfiction writers such as William Atkins (The Immeasurable World: A Desert Journey) and Richard Beard (The Day that Went Missing).
The judging panel for 2022 consists of Freddie Baveystock, Trustee of Gladstone’s Library and teacher at Harris Westminster Sixth Form, alongside previous Writer in Residence winners; journalist and non-fiction author Charlotte Higgins, award-winning poet Jonathan Edwards, and writer, reporter, and editor Cal Flyn.
Peter Francis, Warden of Gladstone’s Library, said:
“The past eighteen months have demonstrated how crucial time, space and support are in terms of fostering creativity. We know our residency programme is valued by our award applicants, and we are looking forward to offering that support once again.”
Judging will take place on October 4.
We are currently looking for an enthusiastic, hard working individual to join our team as Administrative Officer. This new role is an opportunity to gain experience of the arts scene in Wales and receive formal training in business admin. Full details of the role and requirements can be found on acttraining.org.uk.
Key Duties:
Administration and analysis of sales and profitability
Administration of royalties
Administration of bookshop accounts
Marketing research
Promotion to the media and to festivals
Administration of ebook preparation and distribution
Closing date for applications: 9th August 2021
Interview date: 19th August 2021
Apply via www.acttraining.org.uk/vacancies/administrative-officer.
We can now share that The Amazingly Astonishing Story by Lucy Gannon is one of three titles on the shortlist in the Creative Non-Fiction category for Wales Book of the Year 2021.
On hearing the news, Mick Felton, publisher at Seren said: “Seren is delighted at the shortlisting of Lucy Gannon’s The Amazingly Astonishing Story. It’s a book that lives up to its title in the story and the writing. Although it has all the ingredients of misery lit the book is very different from that. It takes the reader to a very good place, through an original, unsentimental inhabiting of a child’s perspective. And then there are the Beatles…”
Wales Book of the Year celebrates outstanding literary talent from Wales across various genres in both English and Welsh. There are four categories in each language – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-fiction and Children & Young People. The English-language shortlists were announced on the Radio Wales Arts Show on Friday 2nd July.
Literature Wales Chief Executive Lleucu Siencyn said “This shortlist is a celebration of the outstanding literary talents we have in Wales, during what has been incredibly challenging times for writers, readers, and the wider publishing sector… I encourage everyone to visit your local bookshop or library and immerse yourselves in the worlds of these exceptional titles.”
The Amazingly Astonishing Story is shortlisted in the category alongside Slatehead: The ascent of Britain’s Slate climbing scene by Peter Goulding (New Welsh Review) and Lady Charlotte Guest: The Exceptional Life of a Female Industrialist by Victoria Owens (Pen & Sword).
The full shortlists for each category can be found on the Literature Wales website.
The public now have a chance to have their say by voting for their favourite book across all categories in the People’s Choice Award. You can vote here on the Wales Arts Review website.
The English-language winners will be announced on the BBC Radio Wales Arts Show on Friday 30 July from 6.00pm, where representatives from the judging panel, Literature Wales, and literary pundits will join presenter Nicola Heywood Thomas for this highlight in the Welsh literary calendar. The Welsh-language winners will be announced in a series of programmes on BBC Radio Cymru’s Stiwdio programme between 2 – 4 August.
The Amazingly Astonishing Story is available on the Seren website: £12.99
To celebrate publication of his new collection Karaoke King, Dai George has created a playlist of songs which tie in with the collection. Read on to find out what he chose and why.
This confident second collection by Dai George addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. As with the Auden of the inter-war period, there is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background, glimpsed in the ‘Fooled Evening’ of a world whose seasonal rhythms have fallen out of joint. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration.
Karaoke King – A Playlist
The Lumineers – ‘Ho Hey’
The Platters – ‘The Glory of Love’
Teddy Pendergrass – ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore’
McFadden and Whitehead – ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’
Frank Sinatra – ‘New York, New York’
Big Star – ‘Nightime’
David Bowie – ‘Station to Station’
Treorchy Male Voice Choir – ‘Myfanwy’
Lord Laro – ‘Jamaican Referendum Calypso’
The Ethiopians – ‘Train to Skaville’
The Skatalites – ‘Guns of Navarone’
The Uniques – ‘People Rocksteady’
Alton Ellis – ‘Rocksteady’
Derrick Harriott – ‘The Loser’
The Paragons – ‘On the Beach’
The Techniques – ‘Love Is Not a Gamble’
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry – ‘Croaking Lizard’
The Congos – ‘Nicodemus’
Bob Marley & the Wailers – ‘No Woman, No Cry’
The Uniques – ‘My Conversation’
Gregory Isaacs – ‘Soon Forward’
Sister Nancy – ‘Only Woman DJ with Degree’
Yellowman – ‘Zungguzungguguzungguzeng’
Sizzla – ‘Babylon A Use Dem Brain’
Count Machuki – ‘More Scorcha’
The Heptones – ‘Party Time’
I-Wayne – ‘Living in Love’
The Maytals / Sister Nancy – ‘Bam Bam’
Charles Trenet – ‘La Mer’
Bruce Springsteen – ‘Thunder Road’
Dusty Springfield – ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’’
Bob Dylan – ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’
In another lifetime, I tried to be a music journalist. A teenage pop nerd, I grew up reading too many issues of Mojo and the NME, and built my identity in large part around the songs that gave me solace, joy, a sense of difference. One way or another the journalism thing didn’t happen, but my new collection of poems, Karaoke King, maybe represents an attempt to grapple with the legacy of that obsession.
Poetry, of course, can’t offer what journalism can: it can’t give you facts, analysis, coherent narrative, or if it tried to do that it would be very bad at it. What it can do, though – maybe – is capture how songs hit the mind. It can sift significance, and work towards some understanding of how an individual stands in relation to these musical artefacts that are at once fixed, specific, culturally determined, and yet endlessly transmissible from radio to radio, mouth to mouth, ear to ear. From the liturgical prayers I heard being sung at Canton Uniting, my childhood church, to the Neighbours theme tune, Karaoke King is full of songs overheard, half-remembered, reapproached, transposed – hauntings and visitations. I thought it would be fun, and maybe interesting, to put together a playlist for the collection, with a set of ‘sleeve notes’ fleshing out the story of how these songs came to be there.
The first four tracks all come from ‘Poem on 27th Birthday’. Set in a hilltop bar in Italy, and written more or less in situ in September 2013, it was the first poem I finished after wrapping on my debut collection, The Claims Office. I tried to be more open and porous in writing than I’d allowed myself to be till that point, and for me that meant tuning into the ambient sounds, letting them bleed into a collage. The dominant tune is an earworm blaring from a nearby car stereo, a sweet-natured, folky track I recognised but couldn’t place – later I found out it was called ‘Ho Hey’ by the Lumineers. It’s the sort of song that Adolescent Me would have scorned, but in a charmed moment it came across, in the words of the poem, ‘as nothing less than the Glory of Love’, a nod to the great doo-wop song of that name by The Platters.
The other songs filter in from a compilation of ’70s funk and Philadelphia soul that the barman switched on to replace the slick elevator jazz that had been playing till then. So we have a singer I recognised, Teddy Pendergrass, singing a song I didn’t know in the moment but later tracked down as ‘I Don’t Love You Anymore’ – one of his first solo singles, a four-to-the-floor disco ripper about breaking somebody’s heart – and this soon flows into ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’ by McFadden and Whitehead. Songs touching songs, overlapping, building resonances. I most certainly did love the addressee of the poem, so it’s the McFadden and Whitehead song that takes over, its message of empowerment modulating through the speaker into gratitude for love.
More earworms, next, with Frank Sinatra’s‘New York, New York’, overheard on one of my many circuits of Clissold Park in Stoke Newington over recent years. The poem it’s taken from is called ‘The Park in the Afternoon’, which unsurprisingly is about parks in the afternoon, but also the neoliberal cult of productivity that turns people into a political problem if they have nothing to do at that time of day. I loved the weird euphoria of this song, with its glitzy promise of inclusion – I wanna be a part of it! – being reclaimed as an anthem of solidarity or defiance.
‘Night Time’ by Big Star is one of the darker songs on this playlist, a theme tune for a run of poems in the first section of Karaoke King which map a hard time in my life – a dark night of the soul. The song itself is quoted in a poem called ‘Rock vs Pop’, an elegy to Roddy Lumsden. Roddy and I bonded originally over music, meeting on an internet forum called Black Cat Bone where debates like ‘Rock vs Pop’ could become seriously heated. Big Star were the sort of group that exposed how hollow that dichotomy is, and I know Roddy was a big fan of their legendary, troubled third album, Sister Lovers. It’s another song about wanting to be a part of it – At night time I go out and see the people – only this time there’s no Sinatra-esque bravado: the irony of that desire is painfully apparent the moment you hear Alex Chilton’s fragile, haunted vocal.
David Bowie’s ‘Station to Station’ is more literally about a long night of the soul – a long and disoriented journey. The poem I wrote about it for Alex Bell and John Canfield’s ‘Bowieoke’ night (and subsequent anthology Cold Fire) tries to capture the sense of blackout and damage on that record, but also to deconstruct the iconography of the Thin White Duke, his persona of the time. Whiteness is of course a part of that formulation, and it’s one of the tacit themes of this book that white pop music culture must grapple honestly with its numerous, often unspoken debts to Black musicians and Black musical idioms.
The place in the book where I’ve tried to confront this legacy, as openly as possible, is ‘A History of Jamaican Music’. The reggae songs on this playlist all offer up quotations and allusions from that sequence, and taken together I think they make for a great, roughly chronological listen. I’ve written about the genesis of this sequence before, so don’t want to belabour the point. All I’ll say here is that, just as these musical selections offer one, partial journey through the rich heritage of reggae, so too do the poems, from my own, very subjective perspective. I wanted to reflect honestly on my relationship to a music and a culture that is too often enjoyed in a passive or exploitative way by British people. These are indeed songs of joy – and songs that can, and should, be enjoyed widely, I believe – but also struggle and complexity; songs, moreover, that could never wholly belong to me, or anyone in my position.
Before we get to them, though, we pass through a song from a culture that is indisputably my own. ‘Myfanwy’ is beautiful, of course, and probably familiar to many people. The title poem of the collection remixes it as a death fugue, a mouldering totem for a certain dubious, romantic myth of Welshness – so I’m glad to pay tribute to it here as God, or the Treorchy Male Voice Choir, intended it. Reading that poem, the eagle-eyed might spot a few references to Twin Town, a film I still love despite its ridiculous, shallow, very unromantic vision of Welshness. (The title of the collection itself, Karaoke King, is a moniker given to the film’s hapless Elvis wannabe, Dai Rhys.) The film’s final scene of a sea burial serenaded by a suited and booted male voice choir crooning ‘Myfanwy’ sums up much of what is funny and pathetic about those old myths and their modern revivals. Maybe one day we’ll be able to hear ‘Myfanwy’ differently again, stripped of all the pageantry.
There’s a wistful turn to the final few songs on the playlist. Charles Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ wafts in like the last day of summer or the first of autumn, a mood I wanted to channel for a poem called ‘September’s Child’. That in-between, nostalgic cusp state more or less represents the situation with my hair right now. ‘Poem in which my hairline recedes’ is the vessel for those (rather trivial) anxieties, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ is the sonic foil – another yearning cusp song, only this time one that stands on the brink of impossible self-realisation and success.
After that, yet more ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’’ from Dusty Springfield, one of my favourite singers. From my teens I’ve always been drawn to classic girl group pop and its soft-soul, adult-oriented offshoots – Dusty, Dionne Warwick, the songs of Bacharach and David, Goffin and King. I saw in this music a model for my own hopelessness in love: solace and fellow feeling in a woman’s voice, when it was women that I yearned for. The poem ‘Obsolete Heartbreak Suite’ is a type of farewell to all that, and an attempt to reckon with the gendered dynamics of the art form, with its unequal distribution of male and female creative labour. I still love all those Brill Building songs but the drama and intensity is second-hand now, thankfully.
Finally, we come to ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ by Bob Dylan. After listening to the glorious official version from Highway 61 Revisited, do seek out the alternate takes that are collected on The Cutting Edge, a box set covering Dylan’s time in the studio during the famous ‘Thin Wild Mercury’ years of 1965-66. It’s the sound of those false starts and early drafts that I wanted to capture in ‘The Mercury Mine’ – Dylan’s painstaking, instinctive graft as he toys with a phrase until he gets it right, rearranging speech parts, nudging them into better arrangements. It’s something of a cliché to talk about ‘pop perfection’, and I’ve loved enough brilliant, three-minute pocket symphonies to understand what people might mean by it. But I think a space for poetry opens up whenever we encounter pop imperfection – hesitance, provisionality, the formation of ideas. That’s one way into it, anyway. Another might be to follow what happens when we encounter perfect music amid the mess and imperfection of our lives.
We are delighted that Angela Graham’s debut short story collection A City Burning has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021.
The prestigious award, now in its fifteenth year, is the only national literary award to recognise excellence in a published, single-authored short story collection.
The 15-strong longlist represents an exciting range of new writing from the UK and Ireland.
Billy Cowan, organiser of the prize, said: “Although it has been a tough year for the publishing industry, it is great to see the short story in such a healthy state with more collections entered this year than 2020. This made the longlisting process very difficult as there were many, many strong entries. Our team of readers finally narrowed it down to a list of fifteen writers that include two previous Edge Hill Prize winners as well as many new writers with first collections by small independent publishers.”
Mick Felton, publisher at Seren, added: “I’m absolutely delighted to see Angela Graham’s A City Burning on the Edge Hill Prize longlist. To be with so many emminent practitioners is a great achievement for a debut collection. We knew A City Burning is outstanding so it’s great to have this recognition.”
The judges of the 2021 prize are 2020 winner Shelley Day, literary agent Elise Dillsworth and Dr Kim Wiltshire, writer and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University.
A short list will be announced by September, with the winner of the £10,000 prize announced in November. A £1,000 Reader’s Choice Award will also be presented to one of the shortlisted authors.
The longlist in full is:
Alice Ash Paradise Block (Profile/Serpent’s Tail)Annabel Banks Exercises in Control (Influx)Kevin Barry That Old Country Music (Canongate)Adrian Duncan Midfield Dynamo (Lilliput Press) Angela Graham A City Burning (Seren)Rosanna Hildyard Slaughter (Broken Sleep Books) Rosemary Jenkinson Lifestyle Choice 10MG (Doire Press) A L Kennedy We are Attempting to Survive our Time (Jonathan Cape)Louise Kennedy The End of the World is a Cul-de-Sac (Bloomsbury) Jo Lloyd The Earth, that Great Exchequer, Ready Lies (Swift Press)Graham Mort Like Fado (Salt)John O’Donnell Almost the Same Blue and other stories (Doire Press)Alexandros Plasatis Made by Sea and Wood in Darkness (Spuyten Duyvil)Fernando Sdrigotti Jolts (Influx)Hannah Vincent She-Clown (Myriad Editions)
A City Burning is available on the Seren website as both paperback and eBook.
Find out more about the prize on the Edge Hill University website.
Today is Dylan Day – an international day celebrating the life and work of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, held on 14 May each year to mark the date Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at 92Y The Poetry Center, New York in 1953.
Why not celebrate with one of these Dylan Thomas related titles?
Dylan Remembered: Volume Two: 1914-1934 – Edited by David N. Thomas
The second of two volumes drawing on archive interviews with Dylan Thomas’s family, friends and colleagues conducted by author, broadcaster and journalist Colin Edwards, this book covers Thomas’ ‘adult’ life from his move, aged 20, to London to become a professional writer to his death in New York. It is a story which we think we know, but the archive sheds new – often contradictory – light on a life which has been much mythologised. Using fascinating new material from the interviews, editor David N. Thomas bases new critical essays on Thomas and painters; on the women behind Polly Garter; the gestation of Thomas’ masterpiece Under Milk Wood; and, most rivetingly of all, on the circumstances of Thomas’ death in New York.
The Dylan Thomas Murders (eBook) – David N. Thomas
In this chilling mystery winding around the secret life of Dylan Thomas, characters are confronted by the legacies of parents to their children. None of them could guess how stories from the past would shape their lives, and plunge them into elemental and dangerous relationships of their own. Set in the Aeron Valley and in Corsica this intriguing and ingenious novel is imbued with the spirit of Dylan Thomas.
Advantages of the Older Man – Gwyneth Lewis
In this light-hearted novella, a Swansea woman believes she is possessed by the spirit of Dylan Thomas. Naturally all is not as it seems. The woman, who works in the Dylan Thomas Centre, meets a rather different Dylan from the one she knows by repute, one who doesn’t really fit in with the ghosts of other poets in heaven and is desperate to train himself to join the fitter shades of the long distance runners instead. Her own life, which has been lonely and sad, is completely transformed by the encounter.
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This week our Friday Poem is ‘The Reed Flute and I’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile. Abeer recently featured on an episode of the Babble podcast which can be listened to here.
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.
“…these poems remind us that even in the darkest times, there is light, and there is love.” – Katherine Stansfield
This week we have two Friday Poems from TROEON : TURNINGS, the new bilingual collaboration between poets Philip Gross and Cyril Jones and artist Valerie Coffin Price. ‘Penny’ by Philip Gross and ‘Glasffrwd’ by Cyril Jones.
To turn, to dig, to plough, to upset, to translate… Bend, lap, journey, time… The Welsh word troeon unfolds meaning after meaning. In TROEON : TURNINGS, two poets confident in their own traditions meet in the hinterland between translation and collaboration – Cyril Jones from the disciplines of Welsh cynghanedd, Philip Gross from the restless variety of English verse.
Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Black Jaguar at Midnight’ by Pascale Petit from her 2014 collection Fauverie.
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2014, this volume has childhood trauma and a dying father at its heart, and the poems skillfully transform painful experiences into expressions of grief. Fauverie redeems the darker forces of human nature while celebrating the ferocity and grace of endangered species: at its heart is the title’s name-sake: the big-cat house in the Jardin des Plantes zoo. Paris, too, takes centre stage – a city savage as the Amazon, haunted by Aramis the black jaguar and a menagerie of wild animals.
