With an
eye to the future and an eye to the past, NCLA is excited to finally be
unleashing its new community archive website for public access, alongside the
final events from the NCLA autumn programme. With memoir from Julia Blackburn
and William Fiennes, poetry from Tony Williams and Peter Bennet, and the
Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures by NCLA’s own Professor Sean O’Brien, there is
plenty to keep you inspired in the run up to the Christmas holidays. NCLA is
also looking forward to reading entries to both the water poetry competition
and the international student short story competition; see below for further
details.
Featuring
images, text and extracts of audio and video recordings from NCLA’s past live
literature events, the prototype of the new NCLA community archive website utilises
social media technology to link authors, topics and readings across
traditional subject boundaries. As your feedback on using the site is
invaluable, please email any
comments to ncenla@ncl.ac.uk with ‘Feedback: community archive website’ in the subject line. This
community archive is the latest addition to NCLA’s growing portfolio of websites, designed to
document and present the activities and research going on behind the scenes
at NCLA.
Are you looking for detailed one-to-one feedback on your own writing
or even for an unusual festive gift for a loved one? Our
mentoring scheme for writers enables you to obtain just the level of
one-to-one support you think you require, when you require it. Mentoring can
be provided across a range of genres including: fiction, poetry, script and
writing for children. Full details of costs and how to apply are
available the NCLA website.
The NCLA water
poetry competition, announced in
the last newsletter, is now open. The deadline for contributions is 13th January 2012. It is hoped that there will be large numbers of entries from
both adults and young people and prompts have been provided on the NCLA
website to encourage creative responses. The sponsor, Northumbrian Water, has
generously donated £800 for prizes in the adult category and £500 for the
under 19 category. The theme is universally inspiring: ‘Water is
essential to life, and also endangers.’ Full details of how to submit
are on the NCLA
website.
NCLA has just announced its second short story competition for international students at university in the UK. The aim is to
encourage the creative exploration of these students’ individual experiences
of living and studying in the UK and to find a medium for assessing its value
in their development. The deadline for submissions is 31st January
2012. The work of last year’s winners and shortlisted writers is published in Crossing the Lines: New
Writing by International Students(Flambard 2011). The
judge of this year’s competition is Tahmima
Anam, whose work has already been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Costa First
Novel Awards. She also won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First
Book. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, was published
in hardcover by Canongate in May 2011. Full details of how to submit
are on the NCLA
website.
NCLA would like to invite you
to visit the foyer gallery in the Percy Building to see the English PEN exhibition Beyond Bars: 50 years of the PEN Writers in Prison Committee, which
highlights ten of the most significant cases PEN has worked on since 1960.
From defending the rights of persecuted writers to promoting literature in
translation and sending writers in to refugee centres and prisons, English
PEN is a registered charity working to promote literature and human rights as
a means of greater understanding between the people of the world.
On
display until early December, Beyond Bars is being hosted in
conjunction with Jack
Mapanje’s reading from his memoir And
Crocodiles are Hungry at Night (Ayebia Clarke, 2011). Jack is a Malawian
poet, linguist, editor and human rights activist. Formerly head of the
English department at Malawi University, he was imprisoned in 1987 for his
dissenting views and radical poetry. On his release, he went into exile in
the UK with his family. The reading will be held in Culture Lab on Thursday
24th November 2011 at 7pm.
Tickets (£6/£4) are available online from the webstore.
Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
Julia Blackburn and William Fiennes will be reading from their work and answering questions on Thursday December 1st at 7pm in the Percy Building, Newcastle University, Room G.05.
Julia Blackburn has written widelywith work encompassing memoir, fiction, travel writing, biography, radio plays and stories. Her family memoir, The Three of Us(Cape 2008) won the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize, and other books have been shortlisted for the Orange prize. Her latest book, Thin Paths (Cape 2011) is a remarkable interweaving of travel, memoir and personal history, described by one reviewer as ‘a book impossible to forget’.
William Fiennes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, acclaimed in particular for The Snow Geese (Picador 2002) and The Music Room (Picador 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 PEN/Ackerley Prize. Novelist Peter Carey wrote of the former, ‘One page and I was hooked’. Of the latter another reviewer wrote that Fiennes has ‘a poet’s gift for creating images that are fresh and original, and yet so natural as to seem almost inevitable.’
Tickets (£6/£4) are available online from the webstore.
Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
First Thursday readings present a great opportunity to
spend a lunch hour hearing writers reading from their most recent work and
sometimes from work in progress. On Thursday 1st December at 1pm
in the Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre, Desmond
Graham and Sheree Mack will be reading. Desmond Graham, Emeritus
Professor of Poetry, will be launching his latest collection from Flambard, The
Scale of Change (2011). Sheree
Mack, who completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University
in 2009, will be reading from Family Album (Flambard 2011).
Professor Sean O’Brien will deliver the Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures on Monday 5th, Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th December at 7pm, in Percy Building, Newcastle University, Room G.13. His theme is Journeys to the Interior: Ideas of England in Contemporary Poetry and, in particular, the importance of myth-making in present day poetry. Sean will explore the depiction of England in the work of contemporary poets such as Carol Ann Duffy and Paul Farley, comparing their versions with those of their predecessors including W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes.
The event is free to attend and is not ticketed – just turn up!
Peter Bennet and Tony Williams, both from the North East, will read from their collections on Thursday 8th December at 7pm in Percy Building, Newcastle University, Room G.05. Peter Bennet’s collection The Glass Swarm (Flambard 2008) was the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2008 and his most recent collection is The Game of Bear (Flambard 2011).
Tony Williams’ most recent collection, All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head (Nine Arches Press 2011) is the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice. His blog, is full of reflections on the process of creativity, as well as containing examples of his published poetry.
The evening will be introduced by Sean O’Brien.
Tickets (£6/£4) are available online from the webstore.
Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
NCLA bids farewell to Dr Kachi Ozumba who completed his PhD in Creative Writing in 2010 and is about to join the School of English at Bangor University as a permanent member of staff. Kachi’s quietly joyful presence has been an inspiration. All those who have encountered him as a tutor or fellow writer wish him success in his new life, and look forward to reading more of his award-winning novels and short stories.
Tara Bergin, a current PhD student at Newcastle University, has just published twelve poems in New Poetries V (Carcanet).
Earlier in November, Jackie Kay, Bill Herbert and Sean O’Brien jointly wrote a poem ‘Mutatis Mutandis’ which they presented at the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival at The Sage, Gateshead.
NCLA is
delighted to announce that both Jackie Kay and Sean O’Brien have been
shortlisted for the 2011 Costa
Poetry Award for their collections Fiere (Picador 2011) and November (Picador 2011).
And finally, don’t forget that you can keep up with NCLA people and events
on the facebook page.