In this issue of the newsletter NCLA is delighted to be able to announce the winners of the NCLA water poetry competition and to bring you news of some exciting forthcoming events. There are also details of a Royal Society Literature masterclass here in the North East and news of what NCLA staff, students and alumni have been up to creatively. The NCLA team is currently planning the Festival of Belonging, the launch of another poetry competition (this time for young people) and a second season of Write Around The Toon’s series of short writing residencies in cultural venues across the Newcastle-Gateshead region with the resulting work of those postgraduate students participating posted on the Write Around The Toon website.
NCLA is
delighted to announce the winners of the NCLA water poetry competition in
association with Northumbrian Water and the Water Theme of the Newcastle
Institute for Research on Sustainability, Newcastle University.
Winners
were presented with their cheques at an awards ceremony at Northern Stage on
Thursday 23rd February by judges John Burnside and W.N. Herbert.
The six shortlisted poems in both the main and North East young adult
categories have been displayed in McKenna’s at Northern Stage, and projected
on to the side of the Percy Building, Newcastle University, as part of NCLA’s
text gallery, LIT.
Winning
poems will be published online shortly, along with reports from the judges.
Details will be published in our next newsletter.
The
winners are:
North
East young adult category
Winner:
Sam Summers with ‘I Made Time Stop’.
Shortlisted:
Conor Robinson with ‘Reflections’; Felicity Powell with ‘The Final Raindrop’
and ‘The Lake at Night’; Daniel Hinds with ‘The Second Story of the Country
House at Aegae’ and ‘The Third Story of the Country House at Aegae’.
Main
category
First
prize: Emma Harding with ‘Lizzie Siddal in the Bath’.
Second
prize: Elaine Ewart with ‘Slipping’.
Third
prize: Hannah Lowe with ‘Early Morning Swim’.
Shortlisted:
River Wolton with ‘Solo’; Pauline Plummer with ‘A Soldier Posted to the
Antarctic 1920’; Terry Jones with ‘On Clouds’.
The fourth issue of Friction Magazine is now available online, and the next issue will be timed to coincide with
the Festival
of Belonging (more about this in the next newsletter). The editors are
always eager to receive contributions, which can be made through this link.
The Royal Society of
Literature is delighted to announce the 2012 RSL/Man Booker
masterclass series.
The northern spring
class will be given by David Almond who will lead a three hour masterclass on
crossover fiction at the Lit &
Phil, Newcastle on Saturday 26th May. The masterclass is open
to members of RSL and to members of the public and to both established
writers and beginners. Places are available for a maximum of 14 people
with six places reserved for Fellows and Members of RSL. Applicants
should email their names to Rachel Page, Rachel@rslit.org (telephone 0207
845 4677) before the deadline of 6pm on Friday 2 March, after which selection
of places will be made by ballot. The class costs £30.
The Spring School provides a wonderful opportunity for discovering more about your own creativity. People who take part are always enthusiastic, generous in support of other writers, and eager to learn. The members of staff are not just skilful teachers, full of constructive ideas but deeply committed. They treat your work with a serious attention that inspires new insights. Experience five days of a writing life that will be utterly memorable whether you are new to creative writing or long experienced. This year’s tutors include Tina Gharavi, Colette Bryce, Linda France, Helen Limon and Viccy Adams. This year’s Spring School is entitled ‘Secret Histories’ and takes place from 19th – 23rd March for a course fee of £300.
To book a place visit the webstore.
Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
Thursday 19th April (7pm, Culture Lab, Newcastle University) sees the launch of Jade Ladder, an anthology of Chinese poetry that shows authoritatively for the first time in English the diversity of contemporary Chinese poetry. Yang Lian and Xi Chuan, two of China's most prominent poets, join Yang Lian's co-editor W.N.Herbert and the anthology's main translator, Brian Holton, in an event supported by the British Council as part of the China Market Focus 2012 cultural programme at The London Book Fair.
This month’s First
Thursday reading is on Thursday 1st March at 1pm in Lecture
Theatre 6, King George V1 building, Newcastle University. The readers are Bob Beagrie and Tara Bergin.
Bob Beagrie is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University
and is involved in many other cross-art forms. His most recent collection is Glass
Characters (Red Squirrel Press, 2011). Tara is a PhD student at Newcastle University researching Ted Hughes’s
translations of János Pilinszky. Her own poetry has been published Poetry
Review, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation. Tara
has also had a selection of poems published in the Carcanet Press anthology New
Poetries V (October 2011). As usual, there is no charge for this event
and listeners are encouraged to bring their lunches, listen and enjoy
themselves.
Michael
Longley and Leontia Flynn will provide a very Irish evening of poetry,
ahead of St Patrick’s Day, on Thursday 8th March at 7pm in Culture
Lab, Newcastle University. Michael Longley is a major poet whose work figures on the schools’ English syllabus in
Northern Ireland and is so well regarded that some sixty writers and artists
contributed to a volume celebrating his 70th birthday in 2009. His
most recent collection, A
Hundred Doors(Cape, 2011), was shortlisted for the Forward
Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has
previously won the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the T.S.
Eliot Prize in addition to being awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
Also from Belfast, Leontia
Flynn, has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her most
recent work, Profit
and Loss (Cape, 2011), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and one
reviewer writes: ‘Flynn's humour, her ability to entertain, and her astute
powers of observation are wonderful gifts’.
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
Tess Gallagher is reading on Monday 19th March at 7pm in the Percy Building, Room
G.05, Newcastle University. Her most recent work, Midnight
Lantern(Greywolf Press, 2011), provides insight not only into her
current writing but her development as a poet over forty years. An American
reviewer writes: ‘A career-spanning anthology like this provides insight as
to how a writer's voice shifts.’ Tess
Gallagher was ‘kidnapped… by poetry’ at an early age, and is still in its thrall.She says of
her inspiration as a poet: ‘Poetry just infuses my life. It makes everything
richer because your ability to pay attention is so sharpened. It’s a way of
seeing the world, and of being in the world, the attentiveness that poetry
brings into your life.’
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
Tess is
also giving a talk on Raymond Carver, her late husband, on Monday 19th March at 12.30pm in the Percy Building, Room G.05, Newcastle University. Free,
not ticketed, all welcome.
Professor
Jackie Kay’s short story, ‘These Are Not My Clothes’, has been
longlisted for The
Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2012. Information
about the launch of her new collection of short stories, due later in the
year, will appear in this newsletter soon.
John
Challis, a current Creative Writing PhD student, is one of the founders of Trashed Organ a Newcastle-based
literature, music and events collective. Trashed Organ is running free poetry
nights at Live
Theatre on Sunday 11th and Thursday 15th March at
8:30pm as part of Fuses:
Live Lab 2012 New Writing Festival. Current MA student Cara Brennan is
reading on Sunday 11th March and on Thursday 15th Marc, W.N. Herbert will be reading alongside current PhD students Christy
Ducker, Daniel Hardisty and Tara Bergin.
Congratulations
to Ros Weston, who attended the short course on Memoir Writing in 2011, and
is about to publish The Black Pencil
Woman: A Portrait of my Mother(The Book Guild, Brighton) under her
maiden name of Ros Holland. The current Memoir Writing short course is, as ever, full so be sure to register early next year when it
is repeated!