This newsletter coincides with two
national appeals for support for important areas of literary life that are
likely to suffer due to funding cuts. Details of these appeals appear below:
please do lend your support and help to protect what we all value so highly.
On a more positive note, NCLA is about to launch a poetry competition and
there is an exciting array of events taking place during November. There are
still places available on some (but not all) the short courses starting on 10th November and our staff, students and alumni have been busy winning and
getting shortlisted for prizes.
NCLA is
delighted to announce the launch of a new poetry competition, which is
generously sponsored by Northumbrian Water. Judges for its inaugural year are
this year’s winner of the Forward Prize for poetry, John Burnside, and Professor WN Herbert. The theme of the competition is
‘water’ and details of how to submit and what the prize will be are due to
appear soon on the NCLA website as well as in the next edition of this
newsletter.
The
third edition of NCLA’s online publication is now available and demonstrates
that the magazine is attracting writers from all over the country and
receiving an impressive and varied range of submissions. Readers can catch up with some of the writing
that took place on 17th September 2011 at a series of workshops to
raise money for the famine in East Africa.
As well as enjoying the quality of the writing in frictionmagazine.co.uk you may
also want to submit
work. Submissions are accepted on a quarterly basis and the deadline for
the next issue is 30th November 2011.
Arts
Council funding is being withdrawn from the Poetry Book Society next March. The
Society is supported by a number of the country’s most distinguished poets
who are acting as ambassadors and advocates. Among these are Jackie Kay, WN
Herbert and Sean O’Brien. The Society hopes to rally support so that its
important work can continue. Its new niche poetry bookshop, www.poetrybookshoponline.com, is the only one of its kind in the world. Any poetry book or CD
currently in print in the UK is available on the site and with a total of
90,000 this is the biggest selection of poetry titles on the web. Please
support contemporary poets – many of whom are associated with NCLA – by
visiting the site and taking whatever action you can. This could include signing
the online petition or becoming
a member if you are not one already. Student membership is
now free.
Following
the success of the London benefit, Poetry Cuts, which was organised by Carol
Ann Duffy in June, there will be a Manchester
benefit on Friday 4th November in which both WN Herbert and
Sean O’Brien will be taking part.
Until 2009, Radio 4 listeners were able to take it for
granted that they could listen to a short story every week day. This was a
treasured experience, somewhat curtailed when the number of stories was cut
from five to three each week from next spring. The BBC is now proposing to
reduce the number of stories to one a week. Since the news of the cuts was revealed in a BBC
press release in July thousands of writers, actors and Radio 4 listeners have
joined in protest by letter, email, Twitter and Facebook.
The Society
of Authors, Equity
UK and the
Writers’ Guild have written joint letters to the Chair of the BBC Trust,
Lord Patten, and to the BBC’s Director General, Mark Thompson, to express
their concerns.
Meanwhile,
the Society has been running a tweetathon with authors Ian Rankin, Simon
Brett, Joanne Harris, Sarah Waters and Neil Gaiman. Each Wednesday for
five weeks one of the authors
tweeted an opening line of a twitter tale and then invited followers to
write the next four tweets in the tale. Guest curators selected the best
lines every hour and the six twitter tales have now been turned into podcasts featuring Hugh
Bonneville, Bill Nighy and Brenda Blethyn. The podcasts are available on the
Society of Authors website until 13th November.
You can join the campaign by signing the petition: www.ipetitions.com/petition/noshortstorycuts/
Full information about courses was included in the last edition of the newsletter but there are still places available on some of the following courses which run for 6 weeks from 10th November untill 15th December:
Writing & Health: Ideas & Practice
Writing for Radio (1) (fully booked)
All courses take place between 5pm and 7pm.
To book a place, please contact Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
What
are they Whispering? is a poetry show about
‘Power. Who has it, who wants it, who tries to take it from you?’ featuring Imtiaz Dharker, Joe Dunthorne and John
Stammers. In this wonderful piece, which has already attracted
outstanding reviews during its national tour, the three poets present ideas about power:
personal, political, natural and technological. Poems that make you laugh,
think and shiver are enhanced with projections, lighting and sound. It takes
place at Northern Stage, Barras Bridge, Newcastle on Tuesday 1st November at 7pm.
Tickets:
£6/£4 are available from the
webstore; Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
NCLA
has run a competition for undergraduate students inviting them to nominate
their favourite books. The winners have been awarded a poetry collection by
one of the evening’s poets and their entries can be found here.
BBC Radio 3’s Free
Thinking Festival of ideas returns to The Sage Gateshead, for a weekend
of thought-provoking talks, high-profile interviews, debates and live
performance. The festival theme this year is ‘Change: exploring the mania for
change sweeping the globe’ and the festival takes place from Friday 4th November untill Sunday 6th November.
On
Saturday 5th November, at 7.30pm, Ian McMillan will host The
Verb, his unique cabaret that combines the spoken word with new writing.
Jackie Kay, WN Herbert and Sean O’Brien have jointly composed a poem on
change for the event, commissioned by NCLA.
Other sessions of note include Dame Margaret Drabble in Books
at Breakfast at 9.45am on Saturday 5th November and Elif
Shafak, in Books for Breakfast on Sunday 6th November at
10.45am. Elif Shafak is Turkey’s best-selling writer, whose award-winning
novels have been translated into over thirty languages.
Events are free but ticketed.
To book, call The Sage
Gateshead on 0191 443 4661 or visit www.thesagegateshead.org
Edgelands:
Journeys into England’s Last Wilderness is presented by Paul Farley and
Michael Symmons Roberts on Thursday 17th November at 7pm in Percy
Building, Newcastle University, Room G.05. One reviewer wrote of Edgelands (Cape, 2011) that it is `a masterpiece of its kind...
this is, quite simply, beautiful, but it is also typical of a beautifully
conceived work of exploration, by two emissaries to the wilderness who do the
wasteland proud’.
The
book was the subject of BBC Radio 4’s Open Country, and can
still be heard through the BBC iplayer. It was also a BBC Radio 4 Book of the
Week, read by Paul and Michael, earlier this year and won a Royal
Society of Literature Jerwood Award for non-fiction in 2009.
Paul
Farley won the Forward Prize for Poetry (Best First Collection) with The Boy from the Chemist is Here
to See You (1998) and has continued to receive acclaim. In 2004 the
Poetry Book Society identified him as one of the Next Generation Poets.
Michael Symmons Roberts is
a distinguished poet and librettist, of whom Jeanette Winterson wrote, 'I
love Michael Symmons Roberts's poetry. He is a religious poet in a secular
age. His work is about the connection between the things of the spirit and
the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence.' He won the
Whitbread Poetry Award in 2004 for Corpus (Cape, 2004).
Tickets (£6/£4) are available online from the webstore.
Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
Jack Mapanje will be reading from his memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry At Night (Ayebia Clarke, 2011) and taking part in a panel discussion with Kachi Ozumba and Becky Ayebia Clarke on Thursday 24th November at 7pm in Culture Lab, Newcastle University. The Malawian poet, linguist, editor and human rights activist was imprisoned in 1987 for his radical poetry and dissenting views. Since his release he has lived outside Malawi and having taught Creative Writing at Newcastle University is a familiar face at NCLA.
The reading is hosted in association with English PEN
and will be accompanied by an exhibition Beyond Bars: 50 years of the PEN Writers in Prison Committee, which
will be in the Percy Building foyer, Newcastle University, from 18th November untill 2nd December 2011.
Tickets for the reading (£6/£4) are available online from the webstore.
Alternatively, call Melanie Birch on 0191 222 7619 or email melanie.birch@ncl.ac.uk
Having
already won Scottish Book of the Year for her autobiography Red Dust Road (Picador, 2010), Jackie Kay has now been shortlisted for the Galaxy
National Book Awards in the Biography / Autobiography of the Year
category (results to be announced on Friday 4th November) and is
also in the running for the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards.
Sean
O’Brien has been shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot prize for his latest
collection November (Picador, 2011). The result will be announced on
16th January 2012.
Katharine
Towers (a former Creative Writing MA student) whose collection The
Floating Man (Picador, 2010) has already been shortlisted for several
prestigious prizes, has now been shortlisted for the Seamus
Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry. The winner will be announced on 25th November. Katherine is also teaching for NCLA on the Poetry
Masterclass and will continue to do so next semester.
NCLA’s
Creative Writing Development Officer Viccy Adams has been interviewing
successful alumni for NCLA including Lee
Halpin, who completed the MA in Creative Writing in 2010 and is the
founding editor of Novel magazine. She has also interviewed Creative
Writing PhD student Helen
Limon about her award-winning novel Om Shanti, Babe.
During his
recent trip to the Lithuanian Poetry Festival at Druskininkai, WN Herbert
translated a poem by a contemporary Lithuanian poet that can be read here.