It seems appropriate to begin the
second semester of the year by acknowledging the growing diversity of local,
national and international partner organisations collaborating with NCLA to
stage its many events. To name but a few, Arts Council England, the British
Council, The Leverhulme Trust, Picador, the Literary & Philosophical
Society, TippingPoint Newcastle, Northern Stage and Write Around The Toon
enable the Centre to create a rich and varied literary experience. And there
is certainly plenty coming up with a new round of short courses, the Spring
School and a new events programme.
Last month’s Infinite Communities exhibition at Newcastle
University’s Culture Lab explored new and exciting ways of thinking about
narratives. Masters students from Digital Media and Creative Writing (the
latter including Cara Brennan, Jamie Crawley and UV Jones) created
interactive narrative works using digital media. For those not lucky enough
to see the exhibition first time around, a second chance will come as some of
the pieces are made available online and as a psychic android phone tour of
campus. In the meantime, further information about the exhibits is available
on the Infinite
Communities website.
NCLA’s ever-popular short courses are due to recommence on Thursday 2nd February and the following courses are already fully booked:
Writing for Radio (2): 2nd February – 8th March 2012 5pm – 7pm
Memoir Writing: 2nd February 2012 - 8th March 2012 5pm – 7pm
Fiction Masterclass: 19th April 2012 - 24th May 2012 3pm – 5pm (note the different time)
Writing for Children: 19th April 2012 - 24th May 2012 5pm– 7pm
Places are still available on the following courses:
Poetry Masterclass: 2nd February - 8th March 2012 5pm – 7pm, led by Colette Bryce, Linda France, W.N. Herbert and Sean O’Brien.
Writing & Health: Writing in groups: 2nd February – 8th March 2012 5pm – 7pm, led by Cynthia Fuller. This course will help those who want to use creative writing in health care and other community settings
The Longer Poem and the Sequence: 19th April 2012 - 24th May 2012 5pm – 7pm, led by Sean O’Brien. Students will be able gain Sean’s advice when drafting their own extended poems.
Documentary Film: 19th April 2012 - 24th May 2012 5pm – 7pm, led by Tina Gharavi. This course will encourage visual storytelling through image and sound.
All these courses take place in the Percy Building, Newcastle University.
To book your place, visit the webstore.
For any enquiries please call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
This year’s Spring School takes as its theme Secret Histories. The course will run from 19th - 23rd March 2012 and details will shortly be available on the NCLA website. The fee for the course is £300 which covers lunches and evening events, including a concert at The Sage, Gateshead and dinner on Friday night. This year’s Spring School tutors are:
Tina Gharavi leads a workshop entitled Telling Our Hidden Inner Stories in 3-Act Structures. This will address the fundamentals of storytelling, by encouraging participants to transform personal experience into universal drama. There will be a bias towards writing for the screen.
Helen Limon leads a workshop that draws on the notorious Donald Rumsfeld statement about ‘unknown unknowns, that is those things you don’t know you don’t know.’ to look at storytelling where characters’ lives hold secrets of which they are unaware.
Linda France uses the Moorbank Botanical Garden to explore how seeds need time in the dark to germinate, as does poetry.
Colette Bryce spends a day at the Dove Marine Laboratory on the coast to look at how close observation of a superb environment is translated into words.
Viccy Adams draws on the extraordinary exhibits of the Great North Museum to develop short stories inspired by the minutiae of physical details, rather like Sherlock Holmes in his deductive processes.
In addition to workshops, there will be talks, readings and musical events to stimulate the participants.
To enquire about the Spring School, please call Melanie
Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
Entries
have now closed for the NCLA
water poetry competition, sponsored by Northumbrian
Water. The responses to both the main category and North East Young Adult
category have been gratifying and judges John Burnside and W. N. Herbert are now enjoying
reading them. John Burnside has just won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize for his
recent collection Black
Cat Bone(Jonathan Cape, 2011) and W.N. Herbert will shortly be
launching a very important translation of Chinese poetry, which he has
co-edited with leading Chinese poet Yang Lian. The results of the competition
will be announced on Thursday 23rd February at 5pm at Northern
Stage at an awards
ceremony that is free but ticketed.
To obtain tickets for the poetry competition awards ceremony, please register via the NCLA website. Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
There is still time to enter our international
student short story competition before the deadline of 31st January. Full terms and conditions, including eligibility details, are
available on the NCLA website.
First Thursday readings resume on Thursday 2nd February at 1pm in Lecture Theatre 6, King George VI building, Newcastle University. Listeners are invited to bring their lunch and listen for an hour to inspiring writers and in February NCLA welcomes Pippa Little and Anne Ryland.
Pippa Little lives in Northumberland. She has three collections, The Spar Box (Vane
Women, 2006) a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, Foray: Border Reiver Women (Biscuit, 2009) and The Snow Globe (Red Squirrel Press,
2011). In 2009
she won The Andrew Waterhouse Award from New Writing North and in 2008 she
won the Biscuit International Poetry Prize. Overwintering is
due to be published by Carcanet / OxfordPoets in October 2012.
Anne Ryland will
be reading from her second collection, The Unmothering Class (Arrowhead Press, 2011). Her first collection, Autumnologist (Arrowhead
Press, 2006), was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection
in 2006. Anne lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed and gained an MA in Writing
Poetry (with Distinction) from Newcastle University in 2002 and a Northern
Promise Award in 2005.
Lavinia
Greenlaw and Carola Luther will be reading their poetry on Thursday 16th February at 7pm in G.05 Percy Building, Newcastle University. Lavinia Greenlaw is a former Chair
of the Poetry Society and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of
East Anglia where she directs the Poetry MA. Lavinia has published
novels, works of non-fiction and four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The
Casual Perfect (Faber, 2011) of which Sean O’Brien says ‘[she] has come
into her own’. Carola Luther is the current poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust. Her most recent collection, Arguing with Malarchy,
(Carcanet, 2011) explores unspoken communication between animals and humans,
the living and the dead.
Tickets (£6/£4 [concessions]/£2
[Newcastle University students]) are available online from the
webstore. Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
In the latest of a series of events held worldwide and in Oxford in the UK, TippingPoint brings its latest event to Newcastle in partnership with the Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability. TippingPoint’s aim is ‘to continue and strengthen the vital process of giving the urgent challenges of climate change and sustainability a cultural and artistic voice. Out of Chaos – short stories for our shared planet (Oneworld, 2012) will be previewed on Wednesday 22nd February at 7.30pm in the Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University. Gregory Norminton, a novelist with a passion for the environment, has edited the anthology, which is a collection of specially commissioned work responding to our ecological crisis. He will be in discussion with Jay Griffiths and Lawrence Norfolk, two of the contributors who share his passion and will read from their stories.
Tickets
(£6/£4 [concessions]/£2 [Newcastle University students]) are available online
from the
webstore. Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
NCLA is
proud to announce that Katharine Towers, one of the Newcastle University
Creative Writing MA alumni, has won the highly prestigious Seamus Heaney Centre
Prize for Poetry, for a
first collection. Readers of the NCLA newsletter will have read in earlier
editions about The Floating Man (Picador, 2010), which has been
nominated for a number of other awards. The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s
University, Belfast, selected Katharine’s collection from over 40 titles. She
wins £1000 and is confirmed as a new poet whose future work will be eagerly
anticipated.
Helen Limon, who won the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children’s Book Award at the end of last year, was recently awarded a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Her celebrations have been intensified by the confirmation of a publishing contract for her prize-winning novel, Om Shanti, Babe, which is due out in September 2012. Helen, who is one of the tutors for this year’s Spring School, is now working on a sequel and looking forward to another visit to Kerala for more research.
Creative Writing PhD student Marianne Archbold has
recently published Advantages
of a Meticulous Schemein The
Journal as a Journal Saturday short story in partnership
with New Writing North. Marianne’s story can be read online.