Uncategorized

TS Eliot Shortlisted poet Pascale Petit has recommended Seren title, Women’s Work edited by Eva Salzman & Amy Wack.
In Inpress’s online newsletter, Petit chose four titles including Women’s Work. Petit whose latest title What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo described the Seren title as somewhere to find modern women poets gathers in one capacious volume.
“Browsing through it [Women’s Work], I continually come across poems thats stop me in my tracks; that lead me to buy whole collections because the poem included in the anthology did that trick of making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The new Seren poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poem Inroads did that on a recent browsing, as did the Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan’s Skin, just to mention two”.
Pascale Petit is reading at Tate Modern, Poetry from Arts on 29 November 19.45 – 20.45 (Free, no bookings taken)
 

Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me is a book of the year in the Observer. Jackie Kay (Novelist) writes “Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life”.
What the Water Gave Me has also been shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize along side another Seren poet John Haynes with his latest collection You.
Pascale Petit’s other collections include The Huntress, The Treekeeper’s Tale  and The Zoo Father. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including three from Arts Council England.

Roshi Fernando, a contributor to Seren’s latest horror book ‘Sing Sorrow Sorrow, Dark and Chilling Tales’ won the 2009 Impress Prize for New Writers.
Award winning Roshi’s short story ‘Three Cuts’, a re-imagined Cinderella where an arranged marriage ends in blood bath is one of 22 new stories from Gwen Davies’s (Ed) anthology, Sing Sorrow Sorrow.
Sing Sorrow Sorrow is a chilling collection of supernatural myth and otherworldly horror stories from some of Wales’ most exciting new and established authors.
Roshi was awarded the prize for her composite novel, Homesick, which comprises a series of interlinked short stories abour a community of Sri Lankan immigrants.
 

Paul Henry’s The Black Guitar is The Guardian Blog’s ‘Poem of the Week’ where it is described as “a poem that includes lines that are barely lines from a poet with a beautiful economy to his writing”. Visit the website here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/nov/08/poem-of-the-week-paul-henry The poem is taken from The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems, available now from Seren.

The Mabinogion Series Launch was celebrated in style at the St David’s Hotel Cardiff, with all four authors and an enthusiastic audience. Owen Sheers, Russell Celyn Jones, Niall Griffiths and Gwyneth Lewis read and discussed their contemporary adaptations and re-workings of these ancient tales with Seren fiction editor, Penny Thomas.
Dating back centuries, the eleven stories in The Mabinogion bring us Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and their own view of the Island of Britain. There is enchantment and shape-shifting, conflict, peacemaking, love and betrayal. In this series comissoned by Seren, the old tales are at heart of the new. Each author reinvents a story in their own way, creating fresh, contemporary tales that speak to the reader as much of our own world as of events long gone.
Seren’s New Stories from the Mabinogion series launched to great acclaim in 2009, with the joint publications of Owen Sheers’s White Ravens and Russell Celyn Jones The Ninth Wave. The latest two novels in the series see leading writers Gwyneth Lewis and Niall Griffiths rework the medieval Welsh myth cycle with The Meat Tree and The Dreams of Max and Ronnie.
Praise for the Mabinogion books
‘Seren’s series of new stories inspired by the Mabinogion may be the greatest service to the Welsh national epic since Lady Charlotte Guest..’ the Guardian 2010
‘spellbinding’ The Financial Times 2009
‘Hauntingly imaginative’ Dannie Abse 2009
 

Pascale Petit What the Water Gave Me and John Haynes You, have been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize 2010.
Pascale Petit What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, her richly detailed and moving look at the life and work of the powerful Mexican painter.
John Haynes shortlisted collection You, is a beautiful book-length formal poem in celebration of his Nigerian-born wife that imagines scenes from her African childhood and recounts their courtship, their early days back in Britain, their children and her work as a nurse.
The T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry, is awarded by the Poetry Society to “the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or Republic of Ireland” in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T.S Eliot.
On Sunday 23 January 2011 will be an evening for the shortlisted poets to read from their books at the Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall, after a complete sell-out last year in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.
The winner will be announced on the Monday 24 January 2011 at the T S Eliot Prize award ceremony, which will be held in the Courtyard at the Wallace Collection. Eliot’s widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot, will present the winner with a cheque for £15,000 and each of the shortlisted poets will receive a cheque for £1,000 in recognition of their achievement.
Pascale Petit and John Haynes will be reading on November 4th, 7pm at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. See more

Hilary Menos, Berg wins the Forward prize for Best First Collection 2010. Hilary Menos was presented her award during a Ceremony in London’s Somerset House.
Seamus Heaney Human Chain won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Ruth Padel, chair of the judges said that the last year had been “astonishingly strong for poetry”.
Seren’s Poetry Editor Amy Wack said ‘I was so pleased to see Hilary Menos with the Forward Prize for Best First Collection this year. I’ve watched her accumulate this impressive body of poems over a number of years, and all the while she was raising four sons and coping with 400 cows on the organic farm in Devon.’

Join us at an evening to launch Seren’s Mabinogion Series. This is an unique opportunity to hear Owen Sheers, Russell Celyn Jones, Niall Griffiths and Gwyneth Lewis discussing their own take on the Mabinogion. In the prestigious settings of the St David’s Hotel, the audience will have the opportunity for Q&A and the chance to get all four books signed by the authors. Thursday October 28th,  7pm.Part of BayLit organised by Academi. Tickets £10. Ticket Line 02920 472 266. Early booking is recommended to avoid disappointment!
Owen Sheers White Ravens
Russell Celyn Jones The Ninth Wave
Niall Griffiths The Dreams of Max and Ronnie
Gwynwth Lewis The Meat Tree
For more information on BayLit Shock of the New contact Academi: 02920 472 266 / [email protected]
www.academi.org

Congratulations to Carrie Etter who has won the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010. At a packed prize-giving in the West End Carrie’s book, The Tethers, beat off strong competition to carry off the glory and a prize of £2500. Judges Daljit Nagra, Tamar Yoseleff and Adam O’Rioran were full of praise for language, conceits and formal qualities of Carrie’s poetry. She will now appear at the Festival Awards ceremony on 26 August at the Waldorf Hilton, and will read with the judges at a special event at Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour on 1 November.
Carrie Etter said “My thanks to all the judges and to my fellow shortlsted poets, the quality of whose work made the prize that much more dear”. The judges comments were as follows:
It’s rare to find a poet having quite so much fun with language and life as Carrie Etter. The poems perform acrobatics with forms as they are driven by the possibilities of words so each piece seems to arrive at its own unexpected and surprised ending. What’s most impressive is Etter’s restless mind that fetches odd allusions or steers off into tangents in a way that always compels us to make the journey. It’s also rare to find a poet who can persistently find joy through suffering with such an assured lightness of touch which defies its lucid surface. A persistently witty and beautifully moving book that is carefully themed and linguistically patterned so that it feels more like the collection of an experienced poet.
Judges’ Report, London New Poetry Award 2010
Commiserations are in order at the two other Seren poets shortlisted. Carolyn Jess-Cooke for Inroads, and Forward-shortlisted Hilary Menos for Berg.

Read an interview with Costa Prize winning poet John Haynes on the Cyprus Well website www.cypruswell.com
His new book-length poem, You, is available now from Seren.