Are you a young
writer, 15-19, would you like to see your work in print in The Journal
newspaper? If so, you might be interested in this fantastic opportunity
from New Writing North and Juice Festival.
To tie in with one of the themes in this year's Juice Festival, the organisers are looking for a story on the theme of DRAGONS. So whether you’re
inspired by knights of the round table and damsels in distress, or would
like to take a rather more metaphorical angle on the theme, they can’t
wait to read your work. Your story must be between 1,750-2,000 words
long and have a 'dragon' theme. Stories should be sent as an attachment
to
laura@newwritingnorth.com, accompanied by a 50-word biography. The deadline for entries is Friday 12th October 2012.
Good Luck!
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Tuesday, 11 September 2012
Man Booker Prize 2012 Shortlist Announced
The judges praised the powerful language and artistry displayed in the six books, whose common themes include old age, memory and loss.
The six books, selected from the longlist of 12, are:
Author Title (Publisher)
Tan Twan Eng The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)
Deborah Levy Swimming Home (And Other Stories / Faber & Faber)
Hilary Mantel Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)
Alison Moore The Lighthouse (Salt)
Will Self Umbrella (Bloomsbury)
Jeet Thayil Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)
At the time of the longlist announcement, Chair of judges Sir Peter Stothard commented ‘the new has come powering through’. This remains true of the shortlist, which includes two first novels, from Indian author Jeet Thayil and East Midlands-based Alison Moore, and three small publishers from Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Myrmidon Books), North Norfolk (Salt Publishing) and High Wycombe (And Other Stories).
In an interesting development, Deborah Levy’s novel, Swimming Home, is now co-published by And Other Stories and Faber & Faber, following a collaboration on a mass-market edition after Levy was longlisted.
Of the six authors, two have previously been linked to the prize. Hilary Mantel won the prize in 2009 with Wolf Hall, the first of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and was longlisted in 2005 for Beyond Black. Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng was longlisted for the prize in 2007 with his debut novel, The Gift of Rain. Four novelists, including Will Self, a radical of contemporary literature, appear on the list for the first time.
The shortlist was announced by Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of judges and Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, at a press conference held at the Man Group’s London headquarters.
Sir Peter comments: ‘After re-reading an extraordinary longlist of twelve, it was the pure power of prose that settled most debates. We loved the shock of language shown in so many different ways and were exhilarated by the vigour and vividly defined values in the six books that we chose - and in the visible confidence of the novel's place in forming our words and ideas.’
Stothard was joined at the press conference by the four other members of the 2012 Man Booker Prize judging panel: Dinah Birch, academic and literary critic; Amanda Foreman, historian, writer and broadcaster; Dan Stevens, actor; and Bharat Tandon, academic, writer and reviewer.
This year’s winner will be announced on Tuesday 16th October 2012, at a dinner at London’s Guildhall, where the announcement of the winner will be televised by the BBC. Each shortlisted author will receive £2,500 and a specially commissioned handbound edition of their book. The winner will receive a further £50,000. The winner may also expect a significant increase in sales of their book: Julian Barnes’ The Sense of An Ending (Jonathan Cape, Random House), which won the 2011 prize, has now sold over 300,000 in the UK in print copies alone.
Ahead of the announcement, there will be a number of public events with the shortlisted authors including, for the first time this year, Man Booker Live: a collaboration between the Man Booker Prize and Picturehouse Entertainment to broadcast ‘Prize Readings’, an evening with the 2012 shortlisted authors at the Royal Festival Hall at London’s Southbank Centre on Monday 15th October. Cinemas across the UK will screen the event, chaired by former judge and BBC Radio 4 presenter James Naughtie, the night before the winner ceremony. Other events include a panel discussion at The Times Cheltenham Literary Festival on Saturday 1th3 October and an audience with the winner at the Apple store, Covent Garden, on Thursday 18th October.
More details of these events and further information about the prize can be found on the Man Booker Prize website www.themanbookerprize.com.
For the latest Man Booker Prize news, follow @ManBookerPrize on Twitter.
Source: Press Release
Friday, 7 September 2012
Brand new trailer for Charlie Higson’s "The Sacrifice"
Written and directed by Charlie Higson for the fourth book in
his best-selling teen zombie series ‘The Enemy’
Puffin Books’ most ambitious trailer ever ...
Fans
of ‘The Enemy’ by best-selling author Charlie Higson don’t have long to
wait for the new instalment in his cult zombie series. But before The Sacrifice,
the fourth book in the series, is published on 20th September 2012, it’s
horrifying world of zombie ‘sickos’ has been brought to life in a
spine-chilling trailer that will whet the appetite of fans new and old.
Please follow this link to see the trailer:
Written and directed by Charlie Higson
himself, this is the fourth in a series of trailers for the series and
is the most ambitious trailer Puffin has ever made for a book. Shot in
locations around London, including on the Millennium Bridge, the trailer
features young actors from Forest Hill School, South London and a cast
of zombie-sickos played by fans who entered a nationwide competition to
appear in the short film. They bring to life some of the scenes from
the new book and a give a taster of the action to come.
The trailer also introduces us to a
grotesque new character, ‘Wormwood’ or the ‘Green Man’, so called as his
entire body is covered in mould - an effect which took nearly a full
day in make-up.
‘The Enemy’ series is set in a
post-apocalyptic London after a mystery illness attacks everyone over
the age of fourteen. Some survive, but those that do face a more
terrifying fate – they turn into hideous zombies with an insatiable
appetite for human flesh. Children form gangs and attempt to survive in
an unrecognisable world where there are dangers around every corner.
Previous trailers for the series have had
more than 100,000 combined viewings on YouTube and have seen Charlie
Higson transforming into a decaying zombie; chilling footage of a
terrified boy posting a clip online of himself being attacked by
diseased adults; and, last year, a rotting zombie (with an uncanny
resemblance to Charlie Higson) breaking into a room full of terrified
children.
Filming for The Sacrifice trailer, Puffin’s most ambitious trailer to date, saw:
100 cups of tea and coffee drunk per day
90 hours of pre-production preparation
80 children auditioning for the cast
70 sandwiches consumed
60 members of cast and crew on set
50 litres of orange juice drunk
40 wardrobe items carefully damaged for zombie effect
30 hours of footage
20 litres of fake blood
10 hours in make-up for the Green Man
a 5am call time on the Millennium Bridge
2 days of filming
1 epic trailer!
Emily Cox, Head of Penguin Children's Marketing, said, 'This
is our most ambitious trailer to date. Capitalising on Charlie's
background and experience in TV, we have gone all out to create
something gripping and entertaining that we believe will capture the
(sick) imaginations of fans and new readers alike.'
Charlie Higson is a successful author,
actor, comedian and writer for television and radio. He wrote the
phenomenally successful 'Young Bond' series which has sold over a million
copies in the UK alone and been translated into over 24 languages. The
series comprises five novels, all of which entered the children’s
bestseller charts in the top five. The first novel in his bestselling
zombie-adventure series for teenagers, The Enemy, was published to critical acclaim in 2009. It was followed by The Dead (2010) and The Fear (2011). Charlie is a huge fan of horror films and books and even studied gothic literature at university.
After leaving university, Charlie formed a
band, The Higsons. He then became a decorator before turning to the
world of television and going into partnership Paul Whitehouse. His
television successes have included Saturday Live, the Harry Enfield
Television Programme, The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, Shooting Stars,
Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, the film Suite 16, Swiss Toni and of
course, the Fast Show. They recently produced the award-winning spoof
radio series Down the Line (BBC Radio 4), in which they both performed
and which became the television comedy series Bellamy’s People (BBC 2).
Charlie is also a successful adult
novelist and has written four thrillers, King of the Ants (1992), Happy
Now (1993), Full Whack (1995) and Getting Rid of Mr Kitchen (1996).
Charlie lives in North London.Source: Press Release
Puffin Virtually Live Celebrates Roald Dahl
And you can get involved too:
- Suggest your favourite Roald Dahl character and be in with a chance of Quentin drawing it live during the webcast
- Tell us your best dreams in celebration of The BFG's 30th birthday and be in with a chance of them being read out during the webcast
- Submit your questions for Quentin and Michael to answer live!
Register now to watch live online and get involved.
And if you would like to celebrate Roald Dahl Day which officially takes place next Thursday 13th September you can download a Whizzpopping Party Pack and more from www.roalddahlday.info.
Thursday, 6 September 2012
Exclusive Interview with Mark Tredinnick, 2012 Cardiff International Poetry Competition Winner
First, thanks so much for your interest in my work.
“Margaret River Sestets” is written in very long-lined stanzas, and one or two lines of each sestet are stepped down. It’s an architecture I’ve used quite often - “Eclogues” and “The Economics of Spring” and several other poems in my first collection Fire Diary, for instance - since I discovered a version of it in the poetry of the great Charles Wright. That form - loose and yet formal at once - felt like my native habitat, from the start. The long lines seem to suit my syntax and the rhythms of my poetic thought and witness; Linda Rogers, the Canadian poet, who also won the Cardiff one year, described my long lines as “bowings” - the kind I used to make on a cello, when I played. In “MRS”, the brokenness of the lines articulates the brokenness of the country (Margaret River lies in the southwest of Australia) and of the speaker of the poem.
I am a poet who seems to need form, some blueprint of the rooms of the poem’s house, before the poem will find him. “MRS” is what I’d call a post-pastoral: a response to stricken and beautiful country; a way of coming to poetic terms, at the same time, with a heart, or perhaps a soul, in need of the kind of healing metaphor and speech music (in long and broken lines) alone can perform - along with the wild music of landscape itself. I wrote the poem because that landscape deserved, and seemed to insist upon, the best poetic response I could manage. I wrote the poem to see if I could order a somewhat disordered self. I wrote the poem, as I often do, because I had some other work I ought to have been doing (an essay this time, on the work of another poet); I seem to need to steal time for poems from other projects (critical essays, web copy for clients…) that I have no choice but to write and really ought to be getting down to. I need, apparently, a poem to be illicit. And so this one was.
You have won several major poetry prizes and literary awards, have 3 published collections of poetry, 4 prose collections and 4 writing guides (with 3 further collections due for publication in 2013) – is there anything else you would like to achieve in your literary career?
You make this sound like a prodigious body of work, and me like a medium-sized writing factory. It’s not, and I’m not, like that at all - though, thanks for mentioning the body of work to which “MRS” belongs. At fifty, I feel I’m only just learning how to write, as if all the work I sometimes feel I’m here to get done lies out in front of me. I don’t think of my writing life as a career, but I do think of what I’m doing as a calling. And it’s my hope that I can continue to make out the right thing to write next and to see and learn the way to get it done. If I write nothing else from here to the end than poems, I’ll die happy. But I keep writing prose - essays, memoir, nature pieces, criticism - and it seems to suit me and to counterbalance the poetry, so I suppose I’ll keep writing that, too. I have a couple of ideas, but most of the prose I’ll write will present itself to me - a commission, a compulsion - when its time is right. There may be a children’s book in me, and a novel. A memoir of some kind later. Who knows? I’m very glad to have been able to get written the books you allude to, and one or two of them (The Blue Plateau, The Little Red Writing Book, Fire Diary, Australia’s Wild Weather) I’m fond and proud of. Naturally, I’m thrilled and astonished and gratified by the prizes, the Montreal Prize late last year, which changed the game for me, and the Cardiff this year: prizes help finance the silence on which the poetry depends, and they help people remember your name and read your work and ask, now and then, if you could send them some new poems. That’s very good, and I’m thankful, but the lapsed Methodist in me keeps letting me know I’m only as good as my next poem. And that I have been blessed, and that now the real work starts.
The continued freedom to write is what I mostly pray for - in a secular kind of way - and the capacity to keep learning better ways to get out of my own way and let the poems that want to find me, find me, and find their way, through my hand, out into the world. I’d like to keep writing poems, and perhaps some other works, that tell some pieces of the big story small, that redeem a few moments and serve, somehow, the planet; that do some kind of justice and remake some souls, including my own, and give a few people back to their real lives (the ones they’re too busy or anxious to live); that help a few readers make sense of the madness around them; that cry the beauty of the much put-upon earth; my hope is to keep making poems that recharge the language, and cry the peril and the joy of creation, that conserve language and love and landscape, some poems that throw some soft bombs at the usual suspects.
You were a lawyer, before moving into book publishing – what inspired that move?
Have you ever tried being a lawyer?! Okay, enough said. Publishing was fun and noble, and I learned a lot about writing and editing, and it was an escape for me from the aridity of law and the tyranny of the time-sheet, but I was, in reality, and increasingly I knew it, edging closer, in book publishing, to the writing life I’d known since I was a child writing I was meant to lead, if I could. There was hardly a moment in book publishing, even the good moments, when I didn’t feel like a man wearing someone else’s clothes. I knew in the end I’d jump the desk and sit in the writer’s chair. After ten years in publishing (Butterworths, Allen & Unwin, HarperCollins), the division I was running was sold, and I had a chance to walk away with a cheque in my hands. That was 1996, and I’ve been writing and teaching ever since, and my clothes fit me much better now.
For readers who are unfamiliar with your work, how would you describe it?
Fellow Australian poet Judith Beveridge was kind enough once to say of me that The Blue Plateau (a work of lyric prose) and Fire Diary (my first collection of poetry) “establish Mark as one of our great writers of place—not just of geographic place, but of the moral and spiritual landscape as well.” She catches my poetry’s territory very well in those words. Andrew Motion described “Walking Underwater”, which won the Montreal International Poetry Prize last year, as “a bold, big-thinking poem, in which ancient themes (especially the theme of our human relationship with landscape) are recast and rekindled.” And his words neatly characterise my poetry, my whole literary project. I think my poems are both hard and easy: easy, in that resonant simplicity and musicality of speech are articles of faith with me; hard, in that, as a reader once put it, my lines “trail a lot of hooks.” You’ll see what I mean, and what that reader meant, and what Beveridge and Motion mean, if you read “MRS”; it is a characteristic poem in its concerns, its landscape witness, its musical play with natural history, mythology, psychology, cosmology, philosophy and “divine sense”. But its lines are the longest and the most replete with - with everything - that I’ve ever written. I have another writing self, who now and then manufactures short-lined, simply articulated lyrics, often about birds and children and people and places and trees I love. I am a poet of wonder.
I am a mystic; I am a secular sort of pantheist. I write the physical and the metaphysical; I don’t trade much in the social, I’m afraid. I’ve never found society especially compelling. Soul, yes; landscape, yes; love, yes; questions of justice and freedom, yes. But not everyday norms and felonies. I write - and value - birds and music and land forms - lots of forms. I write about death and how to survive it. I write intimacy and cosmology, often at the same time. Much of my work is what might be called confessional, though the “I” of my lyrics and eclogues should never be mistaken for my biographical self. A poem arises in the place where one’s self bleeds - in love or grief or longing or wonder - into the Self; the personal becomes the human; the particular the universal. In one poem I write: “I’m writing a kind of confessional ecology here, and you mustn’t believe a word.”
I’ve just done a long interview with Kath Stansfield for New Welsh Review. That interview will give you a very clear idea of the kind of poet and man I am:
http://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=344#pagetop
Are there any poetry collections that you can recommend to our readers?
My own? Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattmann, 2010, which you’ll have to buy through me or the publisher here in Australia; we’re not on Amazon or the Book Depository); The Lyrebird (a little chapbook, published in 2011 by Picaro Press, again only available on line or from me); The Road South, a CD on which I read twenty poemsm - this is available much more readily, even track by track, from CD baby, Amazon and others. The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir (2009) is available from Amazon and The Book Depository. You can sample my poems on The Poetry Archive; you can sample a few others on the website of The Poetry Foundation in the US. On both sites you can read biographical notes and a few of my poems, AND you can download some poems in voice form. You can read and hear “Walking Underwater” on the website of the Montreal Poetry Prize, and you can read “MRS” on the Cardiff Prize site. I’d recommend the Global Anthology put out by the Montreal Prize this year; it includes the fifty shortlisted poems, and they come from all over the world.
Will you be visiting the UK anytime soon, to be part of a literary festival or on a book tour?
I have no plans to be in the UK soon, but I have hopes. Something - a festival, a reading tour, some teaching, a residency, talks with publishers - will take me to the UK sometime before the poles melt completely. It seems unlikely I’ll be able to get across for the Cardiff Prize Awards night, much as I’d like to: Cardiff is along way and a long time from Sydney, and small arts bodies and workaday poets don’t have much spare cash lying about for airfares. But whatever it is that takes me to the UK, I want to come to Wales. I’ll keep you posted.
Where can readers find out more about your work?
My website is a place to start: www.marktredinnick.com.au. There are plenty of leads on there. Also the Poetry Archive and the Poetry Foundation.
Many thanks to Mark Tredinnick for answering our questions.
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
Pete Cox, Poet - Guest Blog, September 2012
As it would be easy to label me a geek (my life is much
like the characters in the American comedy series Big Bang Theory,
except I have poetry rather than science) and I have always had a love
of almost all things science fiction, the events at which I’m dishing out these pamphlets are often science fiction conventions. I can argue that poetry of the fantastical has a long and noble tradition passing back through Tennyson’s Locksley Hall to Beowulf and Gilgamesh. From Edgar Allen Poe the dark torch was passed to the writers who contributed to Weird Tales and other pulps of the ’thirties, H.P. Lovecraft and his circle. A couple of the most prominent poets who have used sf tropes in their work are Edwin Morgan this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith. (If you want to know more about genre poetry and current markets, I’ve written a piece for the blog of the horror author Sam Stone http://www.sam-stone.com/) As a result of these and other poems published in the genre small-press I’ve picked up quiet good reviews and been placed in the top three for the Data Dump award (a British prize for best published sf poem) a handful of times. Recently I found that an American book-dealer
was advertising one of my pamphlets for a nominal amount. My reaction
was to send him a few more and wish him well. In his own way he’s helping to publicise me and for the amount he wanted ($5) he was hardly exploiting the workers.
© Pete Cox 2012
Monday, 3 September 2012
Penny Pepper Press Release: As Paralympians bring sporting pleasures, what of love, what of sex, for the ordinary disabled person?
As Team GB pushes for medals in the London Paralympics, Penny prises open the long-closed door to disabled people’s relationships, in her explicit collection of short stories, available in all ebook formats, including Amazon for Kindle, and Itunes for Ipad, Ipod touch and Iphones.
Says author Penny Pepper: ‘I wrote the stories ten years ago. But people continue to ask about our relationships and our sex lives. It remains a deep taboo.’
The stories feature a wide range of characters and situations, some of which will be new to readers. Yet, as Penny points out, ‘Disability is a universal experience and within that is the need to be desired and loved – to explore sexual pleasure – as with all human beings.’
She has also written a cheeky exclusive story "Bound and Devoted" to commemorate the Paralympics, when the world will be focusing on disabled athletes and disabled people in general.
Penny, a writer and performer from Islington, London, brings her provocative voice to a wider audience with this release. A wheelchair-user since childhood, Penny has been a professional writer for over ten years. She is well-known across the spoken word scene and has taken work to New York, the Edinburgh Fringe, Trafalgar Square, London and throughout the UK.
Rob Young, award-winning writer says: ‘Desires Reborn is an intelligent examination of desire and disabled people. And if it’s passion your after why choose grey when you can have scarlet?’ Rob has worked tirelessly to help Penny’s work gain more attention. He adds, ‘Her intelligence, passion and sheer exuberance sing from the page. There is an elegant mind at work here. She distils her passion then filters it through craft without ever losing a drop of its raw emotion. That is a rare skill and should not to be underestimated.’
Penny leads an extraordinary life and dramatic life, not merely because she is disabled. Punk claimed her at an earlier age, and in the 90s her own band Spiral Skymade no 2 in the Italian indie charts. For the print copy of "Desires", Penny went through the roller-coaster experience of working with Tony Cowell, brother of Simon Cowell of X-Factor fame. Winning an ‘Erotic Oscar’, nude modelling and burlesque performing are a few of the other roles she has found herself in as she strives to breakdown barriers and discrimination.
Her hope is for "Desires Reborn" to reach a larger readership while the world focuses on the elite Paralympians. ‘We need the attention to stay after the games. In the everyday sense, ordinary disabled people are facing tough times with many unfair attacks on their basic freedoms. These pieces are in essence the political made personal. So I hope "Desires Reborn" can play a role in reminding people that hard-won rights are crucial and must remain if we are to live fully and with some contentment.’ She laughs. ‘At least, the point is, we should have the freedom to fail, to be miserable, to experience loss – as much as anyone.’
To encourage people to think, to question, to value difference and disability, bringing it back to the heart of society in a three-dimensional, full-bodied, and perhaps surprising way, is the passion that drives her as a writer. ‘I like examining what is in the shadow, what is not acknowledged. And our stories are unique because they have not yet been truly told,’ she says. ‘But we have to break away from the stereotyping – which is not of our own choosing. I aim to show that outside of labels - we feel and love, we hate, we yearn - and we lust.’
You can purchase 'Desires Reborn' for £3.99 at Amazon and at Itunes.
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