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Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of Glamorgan where he introduced Creative Writing in 1981; he ran this discipline as both an undergraduate and post-graduate subject for nearly thirty years. He was born in Camarthen in 1946 and moved with his parents to Pembrokeshire in 1960. His grandmother’s family had farmed the county for generations and he had been visiting them through his childhood. He played rugby for Pembrokeshire Schoolboys and golf at Tenby before leaving for Swansea University. He and his family have taken over his mother’s house in Lydstep and they stay there frequently.
He has written and edited over thirty books, including The Poetry of Pembrokeshire and has won a number of literary prizes, including a Gregory Award, The Cholmondeley Award, the Dlyan Thomas Prize and the National Poetry Prize. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Society in 2001 and was awarded a D.Litt. from the University of Glamorgan in 2004. His nine collections of poetry all include poems based in Pembrokeshire which deal with its landscape, characters and history.

Books by Tony Curtis

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Nicholas Murray

Nicholas Murray is a biographer, poet, novelist and critic. The author of acclaimed biographies of Matthew Arnold, Andrew Marvell, Aldous Huxley and Franz Kafka, he is also the Royal Literary Fund Writer for Queen Mary College University of London. Visit his website at www.nicholasmurray.co.uk

Books by Nicholas Murray
A Short Book About Love
Real Bloomsbury
Remembering Carmen


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‘The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess’

Seren is pleased to announce the newest poetry collection by Welsh writer Ellie Evans is released on 13th June 2011, head to the Seren website to get your copy today!

The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ We obliquely unearth childhood trauma, fraught or intense relationships and also a singular (and perhaps also Welsh?) delight in rebellion, and in escape through the imagination. Poems like ‘Picnic with Earthquakes’ and ‘Jekyl Island, Georgia’ deftly align exotic locales (Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Greece and the USA,) with intimate states of mind. A fascination with art and history emerge in: ‘A Brief History of Topiary’ and ‘Two Monologues from The Odyssey’. There is also a palpable delight in technique: you will find a sonnet, a villanelle, triolets and a concise free verse where she employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.

Seren will keep you posted on reviews and comments on Evans’s poetry collection.

To find out more about Seren and Ellie Evans search our blog or go to our website http://www.serenbooks.com/

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Ellie Evans

Ellie Evans was born in Carmarthen and was educated in Llandeilo and Cardiff. After reading English at Oxford, she worked in publishing and for the Medical Research Council, before living in Hong Kong, teaching English.  She has spent most of her adult life teaching  in London, but now is based in Powys. She began writing poetry six years ago, and has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa where she is finishing a Ph.D.  Her poems have been published in several anthologies and in magazines including PNR, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Red Poets, The Rialto and Acumen .Evans has given readings at the Bath Literature Festival, Bath Poetry Cafe, Dartington’s ‘Ways with Words’ and ‘The Muses’ Workshop’  on the island of Spetses, Greece.

Books by Ellie Evans
The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess

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Nerys Williams Reads From ‘Sound Archive’

Nerys Williams will read from her first poetry collection, Sound Archive, at The Boar House, Laugharne, Monday 23rd May 2011 7pm.

To find out more about Nerys Williams the author and her first poetry collection published by Seren, click the tagged ‘Nerys Williams’ or go to our website – www.serenbooks.com – to find out more!

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Pascale Petit Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011

Pascale Petit has been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011 for her latest collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo.

Literature Wales announced the 2011 shortlist in both Caernarfon and Cardiff.

Pascale Petit, who was born in Paris and grew up in France and Wales, was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society and Arts Council in 2004. 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 theObserver.  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.

See who else made the shortlist – click here

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The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets to Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy

Finally the day has come! Fresh from the printers – copies of Seren’s new poetry collection – Bob Dylan’s poems have arrived!

The collection is available to pre-order from our website –www.serenbooks.com – in anticipation for its release on May 23rd 2011, not long to go!

Visit Seren Books online to get your hands on a copy!

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‘The Captain’s Tower’: St Ives

Tonight, Friday 3rd May, at 8pm there is an event being held at, St Ives Arts Club, Westcotts Quay, St Ives, Cornwall.

The three editors, Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley, will be present along with live entertainment.

For more information check out the blog’s website, http://thecaptainstowerdylanbook.blogspot.com/ or http://www.stiveslitfest.co.uk/

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The Captain’s Tower Blog

Editors of The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob  Dylan at Seventy, Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley, have launched a blog dedicated to the Collection – http://thecaptainstowerdylanbook.blogspot.com

All information and events regarding the Collection and the seventy poems and poets that are featured can be found on the blog.

Please help Seren in supporting it!