Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter lives in Bradford on Avon and teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University. Read Carrie’s blog atwww.carrieetter.blogspot.com Her debut collection for Seren, The Tethers, won the London Festival Fringe Prize for Best First Collection of Poetry 2010.
author
Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. Her latest collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo(Seren, 2010) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Book of the year in the Observer. Black Lawrence Press published a US edition in 2011. She has published five poetry books, three of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and which were also Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, Observer and the Independent. Her second collection The Zoo Father was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was published in Mexico in a bilingual edition. A poem from it was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. In 2004 the Poetry Book Society selected Petit as one of the Next Generation Poets.
Petit has won numerous awards, including three from Arts Council England. She trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art and was a visual artist for the first part of her life. She is widely travelled, including in the Venezuelan Amazon, China and Nepal. She co-edited Tying the Song (Enitharmon, 2000), the first anthology from The Poetry School, has worked as Poetry Editor for Poetry London and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University 2007 – 2009. She currently tutors poetry courses for Tate Modern, the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd.
Visit Pascale’s website and blog
www.pascalepetit.co.uk and www.pascalepetit.blogspot.com
View videos of Pascale Petit on our website.
For more information on Pascale Petit’s appearances and poetry readings check out our ‘Events’ category on our blog or search on our website.
Ruth Bidgood, Reading at Oriel Davies Gallery
Friday 1st April, 7 pm. Ruth Bidgood will be reading at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown with Jan Fortune-Wood.-Ruth’s most recent collection Time Being is shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize.
Find out more about Ruth Bidgood the poet and her published works with Seren on our website www.serenbooks.com or under our ‘Seren Authors’ category on our blog.
Graham Mort ‘Touch’ longlisted for Edge Hill Short Story Prize
Graham Mort’s book of Short Stories Touch, has been longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Touch, which was published by Seren in 2010, is on this year’s long-list with an impressive range of award-winning writers.
Touch includes a Bridport prize-winning story “The Prince” and was described by Novelist and Bridport judge Tracy Chevalier as “the writing is word-perfect.. with the story quietly remarking on how something out of the ordinary both does and doesn’t affect daily life. In particular, I was enchanted by deft descriptions of nature”.
Also on the longlist is Roshi Fernando, who features in Sing Sorrow Sorrow, an anthology also published by Seren.
Short-list to be announced in May and the winner will be announced at an award ceremony at Blackwell Bookshop, Charing Cross Road in July.
Find our more about Seren author Graham Mort on our blog under ‘Seren Authors’, or on our website.
Bruce Cardwell
Bruce Cardwell’s connection with horses goes back to his childhood in Ireland. A long career in the world of the horse includes work with organisations as various as William Hill and the National Trust, a stud farm in the Cotswolds, a millionaire’s stables in Greece and a rest home for horses in Buckinghamshire. He has also trained show-jumpers and owned horses to ride and drive. He has lived in West Wales for many years and is now resident in Aberystwyth
Books by Bruce Cardwell
‘Noteworthy’
Noteworthy
Author:
Music makers are the focus of Bruce Cardwell latest book of black and white reportage and portrait photography. Practitioners of acoustic and vocal music – folk, gospel, opera, choral, classical and ethnic – in Wales as the start of the twenty first century make a rich and diverse gallery of talent. Cardwell’s subjects range from harpists Catrin Finch and Elinor Bennett, through Bryn Terfel, conductor Owain Arwel Hughes and Incredible String Band songwriter Robin Williamson to Welsh bagpipers, hurdy gurdy players, harpmakers, and African drummers in Newbridge and steel bands in Carmarthen.
Due for release on 4th April 2011.
Grahame Davies
Grahame Davies is a poet and a critic in Welsh and English, and is a winner of the Wales Book of the Year Award. His work includes the novel, Everything Must Change, and The Chosen People, an anthology about Wales and Judaism. He has a PhD from Cardiff University, where he is an Honorary Research Fellow, and has been awarded an Hon. DLitt from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His next book of poetry, The Complete Ind Grahame ex of Welsh Emotion, is forthcoming from Seren. Grahame was born in Wrexham but lives now in Cardiff.
Books by Grahame Davies
Ruth Bidgood
Ruth Bidgood was born in Blaendulais, near Neath, educated at Oxford, and worked as a coder in Alexandria, Egypt in World War Two. She has lived in mid-Wales since the mid-sixties. The author of several prize-winning volumes of poetry, she also writes local history.
Books by Ruth Bidgood
New and Selected Poems
Selected Poems
Singing to Wolves
The Fluent Moment
Time Being
The Roland Mathias Prize 2011
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROLAND MATHIAS PRIZE
Seren author Ruth Bidgood has been shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize 2011.
The event which will take place 7.oopm Friday 8th April, The Guildhall Brecon, recognises works published in the fields of poetry, short stories, literary criticism and Welsh history.
The event hosted by BBC Cymru/Wales will include readings by the shortlisted authors.
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Time Being is Ruth Bidgood’s 10th collection in a career that spans almost 40 years. It has been said, rightly, that Bidgood’s work is ‘emphatically a poetry of location’ and it is the history and nature of her particular region of mid-Wales that most inspire the author. Her narratives are often literally exploratory and discursive as in ‘Viewpoint’ where a walk in the countryside revives both personal memories and knowledge of the stories associated with a place. Her distinctive voice has a quiet authority but also a subtle, conspiratory edge, as if she is letting one in on a secret, unveiling a hidden fact, or making a discovery. She avoids sentimentality, but – unfashionably – not sentiment; an observation can engender joy or sorrow or fear uncluttered by irony. Her descriptions are sharp and memorable, tending to a cool accuracy. Nature is not always a benign presence but also often inescapably dark and mysterious as in’ Illusion’ where “A goshawk climbs a tower of air and is gone”. Also notable here are several substantial sequences: ‘Gaps’, ‘Time Being’, ‘Reading a Landscape’. These are ambitious attempts to transcend the lyric and move towards a more epic, multi-faceted form equal to the many experiences of her long life.
David Hurn
David Hurn was born in England in 1934 of Welsh parentage. It was as a freelancer that he gained an international reputation for his reportage of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. He later gave up current-affairs coverage for a more personal perspective on photography. He became a member of the prestigious Magnum Agency in 1967, and during the seventies established the acclaimed School of Documentary Photography at Newport, Wales. Since leaving there he has photographed and taught around the world.
Books by David Hurn
Living in Wales
Writing the Picture
