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Pascale Petit has been awarded the Manchester Writing Prize for Poetry 2013. Pascale received the award ahead of other shortlisted poets Abigail Parry, Wayne Price, Victor Tapner, Carolyn King and Debra Marquart at an awards ceremony held in Manchester on 18th October.
Judges Bernard O’Donoghue, Adam O’Riordan and Fiona Sampson  were unanimous in their decision to award Pascale the prestigious prize for a collection of unpublished poems from her forthcoming collection Fauverie, which will be available from Seren later in 2014.
The Manchester Writing Competition was devised by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and her team at Manchester University. The prize was designed to attract the best new writing from around the world, and to establish Manchester as the focal point for a major literary award. Since it began in 2008, the Competition has awarded more than £50,000 in prize money and includes Anthony Rowland, Leseley Saunders and Mandy Coe amongst its previous winners.
You can read Pascale’s winning poems here

A brave youngster from downtown Splott in Cardiff and a mysterious clinic in a remote borderlands town are the unlikely subjects to complete Seren’s ground-breaking series of New Stories from the Mabinogion. 
From the pens of acclaimed authors Trezza Azzopardi and Tishani Doshi, the final two novellas in the series, The Tip of My Tongue and Fountainville are launched this month in London, Swansea and Cardiff.
And on October 21st we are inviting you celebrate at a grand finale launch, featuring our Mabinogion authors in the wonderful setting of Somerset House on the Strand. Tickets are £7 with £2 redeemable against the price of a book. Expect and evening of wit, entertainment and excellent prose with our marvellous panel of Owen Sheers, Niall Griffiths, Russell Celyn Jones, Gwyneth Lewis, Horatio Clare, Fflur Dafydd andCynan Jones  as well as our 2013 authors.
There will also be a further chance to hear Tishani Doshi at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Wales on October 29th and Tishani and Trezza Azzopardi will launch their books at the Senedd in Cardiff on November 5th.
The series, which began in 2009, has been hailed as maybe the greatest service to the Celtic myth cycle of the Mabinogion since Lady Charlotte Guest (the Guardian). Since then we’ve been on a rollercoaster journey from the land of giants, heroes and magical beasts out to the orbit of Mars, back to WWll and the Tower of London, journeyed to the edges of India and and forward to the warm and war-torn UK of the near future; seen Iraq in drug-addled dreams, and viewed Wales aslant, from its countryside to its council estates. We’ve touched on nation-building and personal tragedy, bravery and betrayal.
In The Tip of My Tongue, Trezza Azzopardi’s retelling of ‘Geraint and Enid’ transforms a medieval heroine who won’t be silenced into a 1970s girl who, no matter how difficult the circumstances, always seems to get the last word. Trezza says:
‘Greek myth, fairy tales, modern literature and horror films are full of such interdictions: don’t look back, don’t stray from the path, don’t open the door, don’t pick up phone… and for Enid, it was: don’t speak. This particular interdiction harks back to the bible: ‘Let your women keep silence… for it is not permitted unto them to speak’ (Corinthians); and it resonates through our culture, from the medieval Scold’s Bridle right up to the recent tirade of verbal abuse heaped upon feminist and women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke by the Republican ‘talk radio’ host Rush Limbaugh…. In the voice lies power.’
And Tishani Doshi’s take on Arthurian myth The Lady of the Fountain, transports the reader to the bizarre, opium-fuelled world of Fountainville, established in 1501 but ignored by the powers that be until Luna becomes the assistant to Begum, Lady of the Fountain, the magical powers of which are soon to attract the attentions of the reserved and haughty Mr Owain Knight.
Tishani writes: ‘In India, where I grew up, myths are everywhere; they are pervasive and alive in the most wonderful and frightening ways, and they survive in multiple retellings. We stake ownership in them because they inform our most basic ideas of vice and virtue. Myths are, ultimately, personal. And that’s why I believe it’s somewhat dangerous to meddle with other people’s myths.
When I was asked to retell ‘The Lady of the Fountain,’ I suffered all the usual outsider’s misgivings.’
But myths are, ‘ forever open, ready to be transformed and reinterpreted. For this reason, and perhaps, to tap into my latent Welshness, I agreed to enter the world of the Mabinogion…’
Trezza Azzopardi was born in Cardiff to a Maltese father and a Welsh mother. She studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is currently a lecturer there. Her acclaimed first novel, The Hiding Place (2000), is the story of a Maltese family living in Cardiff during the 1960s. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). The book was also adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and has been translated into 14 languages. Her second novel, Remember Me (2004), centres on 72-year-old Lilian (also known as Winnie), a homeless woman, in search of her stolen possessions and her troubled past. Her most recent novel is The Song House (2010).
Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, in 1975 to Welsh-Gujarati parents. A poet, dancer and writer, she has a Masters in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Tishani’s debut book of poems, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her second collection Everything Begins Elsewhere is published by HarperCollins (India); Bloodaxe (UK) and Copper Canyon (USA).She has an Eric Gregory Award, and has won the All-India Poetry Prize. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers (Bloomsbury) is translated into several languages and was shortlisted for the Hindu Best Fiction Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary award.

Booking is now open for ‘The Wild Life of Poems’ – a poetry writing course at Chateau Ventenac in the South of France with Pascale Petit, 17th – 23rd May 2014. For more details visit the website HERE. To book visit the Chateau website HERE, Email [email protected] or phone Julia in the Languedoc: +44 (0) 7773 206344 or 0033 671 894990

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness sees the Seren list, like Keats’ vines, loaded and blessed with fruit round our thatch-eaves. New poetry titles include Dai George’s first collection, The Claims Office, prize-winning Kathryn Simmonds’ second collection, The Visitations, and Disturbance, a fittingly disturbing novel in verse by Ivy Alvarez. In translation there is In Reality, the selected poems of Jean Portante, a major European voice from Luxembourg.
Just harvested: Peter Finch’s epic walk along both sides of the Bristol Channel, Edging the Estuary, the fictional walk from Wales to London by Ibrahim & Reenie in David Llewellyn’s eponymous novel, and the childhood memoir of mountain-walking (there’s a theme here) Owain Hughes: Everything I Have Always Forgotten, in which his father, the novelist Richard Hughes, looms large. And if you’re a walker yourself, try visiting some of the places in Borderlands, Phil Cope’s lusciously illustrated compendium of holy wells and other watery features of the Welsh Marches.
And we have many events to celebrate our autumn titles. Take the rare opportunity to meet Jean Portante as he reads in Bangor, Aberystwyth and Cardiff. See David Llewellyn in action in Cardiff, or take in an exhibition of Phil Cope’s photographs. Above all, if you’re London-based, make sure you get a ticket for the grand finale of Seren’s retellings of the Mabinogion series – all the authors in one event at Somerset House.
The days may be getting cooler and the night darker but there’s plenty of heat and light in the Seren list.

Pascale Petit was commissioned by the A. M. Qattan Foundation to write fifteen poems for an artbook collaboration,Effigies, with Lawand Al-Attar on the occasion of his his first solo UK exhibition ‘Lawand: Equinox, Between Beirut and London’ at The Mosaic Rooms. The exhibition opens on 4th October. Pascale will be running a workshop at the Mosaic Rooms on 14th October and the book will be launched on 19th October at 12 noon at a discussion between Lawand and Pascale about poetry and art. Further information about both these events can be found on our listings pages HERE.

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This September marks the 90th birthday of  author, Dannie Abse.
 
To celebrate this special occasion, Literature Wales invite’s you to join Dannie for a delicious meal at the Mughal Emperor, Cowbridge’s award-winning Indian restaurant, on Monday the 30th September at 7pm.
 
Poet, novelist and dramatist, Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff. Over the years Dannie has worked extensively with Seren, from advising founder Cary Archard in our infancy, to publishing several award winning books with Seren including: There Was a Young Man From Cardiff, Welsh Retrospective, Intermittent journals and The View from Row G
 
his most recent novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas, was published in 2002 and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003 his New and Collected Poems received the Special Commendation of the Poetry Book Society, and his book of poetry, Running Late received the Roland Mathias Prize in 2007. The Presence, was the winner of the 2008 Wales Book of the Year Award. 
 
The evening’s celebrations will feature the presentation of a specially commissioned poem dedicated to Dannie by National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke.
 
Tickets are £23 per person and can be booked by contacting Literature Wales on: 029 2047 2266 / [email protected]

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Rhian Edwards’ Clueless Dogs is named Wales book of the year 2013. Rhian claimed the Roland Mathias Prize for Poetry ahead of fellow Seren author, Deryn Rees-Jones, (Burying the Wren) and Picador’s Samantha Wynn-Rhydderch (Banjo), before going on to be named as Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2013. Rhian also scooped the Peoples Choice Award at the awards ceremony held at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
The Wales Book of the Year is awarded annually to the best Welsh and English-language works of literary criticism across three categories: Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. The winner of each category receives £2000 and goes forward to be considered for the Wales Book of the Year Award, with the overall winner receiving a further £6000.
The poems chronicle a fraught childhood in Bridgend, teenage lusts, student rivalries, damaged peers and tense situations. Although Clueless Dogs is Edwards’ first collection, it has been highly praised and was the Winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry 2011/12. It was also on the 2012 shortlist for the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for best first collection.
Those dogs aren’t so clueless after all!

Marianne Burton’s She Inserts the Key is on this years shortlist for the Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, whilst Christopher Meredith’s ‘The Record Keepers’, taken from his collection Air Histories has been highly commended.
The awards are among the most coveted poetry prizes in Britain. Previous recipients of the First Collection award include Simon Armitage, Don Paterson, Kate Clanchy, Tishani Doshi and Sam Riviere. Seren authors Hilary Menos (who won in 2010) and Kathryn Simmonds (2008) have their second collections published this year.
The Winner will be announced in October and will receive a £5,000 prize.
Although this is her first full length book, Marianne is no stranger to  awards. Her pamphlet The Devil’s Cut was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2007 and she has won  and been placed in a number of competitions including Mslexia, TLS, Edwin Morgan, Bridport, and Cardiff International.

Summer 2013 and Seren launches its first-ever ebook exclusive, containing nine selected short stories absolutely free! Available to download from June 15, Seren Shorts includes top stories from our two recent spring collections, All the Souls by Mary-Ann Constantine and The Scattering by Jaki McCarrick. There are also stories from four other collections – which are also newly available as ebooks in our summer e-short story extravaganza.
These are: Pumping Up Napoleon by Maria Donovan; The Woman who Loved an Octopus by Imogen Herrad; My First Colouring Book by Lloyd Jones and The Great Master of Ecstasy by Glenda Beagan. Add in stories from Sunday-Times shortlisted The Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick and Edgehill prize-winning collection Touch by Graham Mort, plus Wales Book of the Year shortlisted The Woman at the Window by Emyr Humphreys (coming soon on ebook) for a great free summer read.
You can download a free copy from the following links:
Kindle: http://amzn.to/1aF4fYO
Kobo: http://bit.ly/1cU33gN

 Seren is celebrating after the announcement that two poets – Rhian Edwards and Deryn Rees-Jones – are shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Award, the poetry category of Wales Book of the Year 2013.

Rhian Edwards is a winner of the John Tripp Award, and her debut Clueless Dogs was previously shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. “Poetry has never sounded so alive” – Cerys Matthews. “An astounding Welsh poet with performances that get you in the emotional gut…” – Ian McMillan
Deryn Rees-Jones’ Burying the Wren was also on the shortlist for the TS Eliot Prize, and a Poetry Books Society Recommendation. “A major event and achievement in the poetry of these islands.” – Ian Duhig. “A powerful, deeply moving collection…” – John Burnside. 
Also shortlisted for The Roland Mathias Prize was Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch with Banjo (Picador). For full details and the shortlists in Fiction and Non-fiction and Welsh-language books, visit Wales Book of the Year where you can watch a video of the announcement and discussion by the Chairs of Judges Alun Gibbard and Jasper Fforde.