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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘One-Sided Conversation with a Hydrozoan’ by Katrina Naomi from her collection Battery Rocks which recently won the Holyer an Gof Award for Poetry.

We want to build a better picture of who our readers are, the kinds of books they love, what they’re buying and why to help inform our commissioning decisions, marketing strategy and business direction. We want all our books to find their readers, but we also want to make sure our audience is finding books they’ll love on our publishing lists. 

If you love books, please help us by taking 25 minutes (ish) to fill in our Readership Survey. In return for your time, we’re offering the chance to win this fabulous book bundle including 10 Seren books and one of our soft-touch notebooks, worth around £150.

Make yourself a panad and take a look below.

We’re excited to announce the three writers chosen to develop publications proposals for our Publications Sub-committee following our recent call-out for Fiction and Non-fiction books by writers with lived experience of racism, ableism and/or poverty. This project was generously supported by a Books Council of Wales’ 24/25 New Audiences Grant.

The Fiction and Non-Fiction Call-out Panel included Crystal Jeans, Polly Atkin and Abiola Bello as well as members of the Seren Books team. Nathan Abrams, Naomi Parsons and Katrina Moinet’s submissions, all novels, reflect a range of perspectives and captured the attention of the panel through the strength of their writing, creativity and uniqueness. They are now working closely with the team to further develop their ideas into full publication proposals.

The chance for the writers to be more hands on with this part of the submissions process – which normally takes place behind the scenes – is unique to this call-out and reflects our aim to openly share how we work.

Our publications proposals explore the book idea in greater detail with the aim of convincing the Publications Sub-committee and Seren Board to publish it. They support the development of the pitch by pushing the team and writer to make a case for the book idea’s creative and commercial potential within the context of our wider publications list.

Publications proposals include detail on the concept, the writer, the potential target and core reader, alignment with current publishing trends, project budget, design, marketing and perceived risks. They are a crucial step in making sure we publish books which are innovative, equitable, and engaging to a diverse and significant readership. They also open our team and writers up to positive critical scrutiny, as well as offering support from a range of industry experts before books are commissioned.

Our CEO Bronwen Price says: “We were thrilled that the Books Council of Wales recognised the need for greater transparency in publications processes and supported us to open the curtains on how commissioning decisions are made at Seren Books. Nathan, Naomi and Katrina are uniquely different talents and all offer fantastically original ideas for possible future titles. We look forward to presenting their completed proposals to our Publications Sub-committee over the coming months.”

Introducing the writers:

Nathan Abrams is a native North Londoner now living in North Wales. He teaches at Bangor University and has been involved in various project to raise awareness of the hidden history of Jews in Wales, which stretches back some 2,000 years.

Katrina Moinet is a writer from Ynys Môn. Katrina won the won Globe Soup Short Story and Flash Fiction prizes, was double-shortlisted in the Staunch International Book Prize and features in Mslexia Best Women’s Short Fiction 2024. Their debut pamphlet Portrait of a Young girl Falling (Hedgehog Press) was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2025.

Naomi Parsons was raised in the Welsh Borders, on a smallholding that was also home to goats, tipis and visiting New Age Travellers. She was briefly homeschooled, which consisted entirely of reading up a tree, and went on to study History of Art at Sussex University. Find her on Instagram @smoke_in_the_lanes.

We’re looking forward to working closely with each writer and can’t wait to champion their books in the not-too-distant future.

We’re delighted to see that Abeer Ameer, author of Inhale/Exile, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written for her poem ‘At Least’ first published by MODRON. Abeer is shortlisted alongside Tom Branfoot, Tim Tim Cheng, Nick Makoha and poet laureate Simon Armitage.

The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written is open to any poem published in the previous year in written form. Other categories in the awards include Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Performed, Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Forward Prize for Best Collection which was won previously by Kim Moore.

The judges of this years awards are Sarah Hall, Lisa Kelly, Hannah Lavery, Sean O’Brien and Rommi Smith. Hannah Lavery said of the shortlists: “Poetry in these dark times can offer us so much: it can be the rallying call; the necessary challenge and the stark provocation; the rage and the grief; and the beauty of connection and hope. Giving us the much-needed opportunity and invitation for solidarity and empathy, and in these shortlists and also in the highly commended lists, there is poetry to be found which is ambitious in all the ways that count; poetry which attempts to explore the truth of who we are and where we are.”

The winners of each category will be announced at announced at the award ceremony taking place at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival on Sunday 26th October 2025.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘(i)’ by Deryn Rees-Jones, the first in a sequence of sonnets from her new collection Hôtel Amour.

Katrina Naomi’s poetry collection Battery Rocks has been shortlisted for the Holyer an Gof Award which promotes books about Cornwall, set in Cornwall or in Cornish (Kernewek).

Battery Rocks takes the Cornish swimming spot, Battery Rocks in Penzance, as the starting point for a poetic exploration of nature, risk, swimming and the sea. Revelling in friendship, love and community, the Cornish language and landscape are deeply entwined, as Katrina deftly experiments with poems in Kernewek (Cornish) and English. 

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced during the award ceremony on 5th July 2025. The full list of shortlisted titles can be viewed on the Gorsedh Kernow website.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The View’ by Sheenagh Pugh from her collection Afternoons Go Nowhere.

In honour of the 22 June being Gwen John’s birthday, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘Love is lonelier than solitude’ by Sue Hubbard from her collection God’s Little Artist.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘For the Drag Queen Who Lives in My Building’ by Emily Cotterill from her collection Significant Wow.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘A Pond for All Eels’ by Taz Rahman from his collection East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Catch Taz and lot of other interesting poets at Aberystwyth Poetry Festival this weekend. View the programme here.