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Past Events
Summer Term 2019
Thursday April 25 – Sam Jordison (Galley Beggar Press/The Guardian)
Sam has extensive editorial experience and knowledge of the book world – having written several best selling works of non-fiction, including the notorious Crap Towns series, the best-selling I Spy for adults series, a book about Literary London (co-authored with Eloise Millar), political books like Enemies Of The People and, most recently, The 10 Worst Of Everything.
As a journalist, he mainly writes for The Guardian, and mainly about books. He runs the Not The Booker Prize, and the Guardian's online book club, The Reading Group. He has also taught about publishing on several Creative Writing university courses, as well as teaching a course on publishing at Greenwich University and journalism at UEA. He is also co-director of the award-winning independent publisher, Galley Beggar Press.
Monday May 13 – Olivia Waring (Screenwriter/Filmmaker)
Olivia Waring is a 27-year-old London-based screenwriter and journalist from Hove. She first got a taste for writing scripts while studying English at York. After graduating in 2013 she started a Masters in Scriptwriting at UEA, where she was taught by Val Taylor, Steve Waters and Rob Ritchie. Her dissertation was a screenplay called Nocturnal, a drama/thriller inspired by a short story she'd written.
In November 2018, Nocturnal was shot in Hull and Bridlington in Yorkshire. It was directed by Nathalie Biancheri and featured Lady Macbeth actor Cosmo Jarvis, and young Irish star Lauren Coe, in the two lead roles. While finishing her directorial debut, short film Flora & Fauna, Olivia is working on other writing projects including TV series and new feature film screenplays.
Thursday 6 June – Sophie Hughes
Sophie Hughes has translated novels by Spanish and Latin American writers such as José Revueltas, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rodrigo Hasbún and Laia Jufresa. She has been the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, six English PEN translate awards, and in 2018 she was named one of the Arts Foundation 25th anniversary fellows for her contribution to the field of literary translation.
Spring Term 2019
Thursday Jan 10 – Lucy Brydon: Taking a Script to the Screen (2pm)
Lucy Brydon is a Scottish writer, filmmaker and visual artist. Lucy's first novel, Shanghai Passenger, was published in September 2015 by Blue Mark Books. Her debut feature film, Sick(er), commissioned by the Film London Microwave initiative with funding from the BBC and BFI, is currently in post production. Lucy has written, directed and produced work in the US, the UK and China - where she lived for several years. Her work has been included in film festivals internationally. Lucy also writes academically on film with a focus on gender and Scottish cinema.
Thursday Jan 17 – Paul Cooper: Writing from the Ruins
Paul Cooper is a researcher and novelist from Cardiff, Wales. He was educated at the University of Warwick and the UEA, and after graduating he left for Sri Lanka to work as an English teacher, where he took time to explore the ruins both ancient and modern. He has worked as an archivist, editor and journalist. His first novel, River of Ink, was published in January 2016, and his second is in the final stages of editing.
Thursday Jan 24 – Kit de Waal: The Trick To Time
Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother, who was a childminder and foster carer and a Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels. She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children, and has written training manuals on adoption, foster care and judgecraft for members of the judiciary. Her writing has received numerous awards including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015 and the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.
MY NAME IS LEON, her first novel was published in 2016.
Website: https://www.kitdewaal.com
Thursday Jan 31 – Lytle Shaw: 23 Things
23 Things is the third in a series of architecture-centered prose works that began with The Clifford Chadwick Clifford Collection (2011) and The Moiré Effect (2012).
"Chronicling on-site research commissioned from me by a mysterious Belgian graphic designer, 23 Things is organized around a group of works in the orbit of the Italian architect Carlo Mollino (1905-73), who designed the bulbous and baroque space of the Turin opera house, a set of windowless fantasy interiors in the city that may have functioned primarily as photographic backdrops, and several extreme Alpine structures, including an under-the-Matterhorn chalet for the then fastest man on skis, Leo Gasperl. Comparable perhaps to a Bond villain, Mollino drew simultaneously with both hands, wrote a treatise on downhill skiing, engineered and drove race cars at Le Mans, was a stunt pilot, and the designer of what was until very recently the most expensive piece of furniture ever bought at auction. The more I looked into the Mollino industry, however, the more it developed an unhealthy curiosity about me. And so this book chronicles my descent into the world of "risotto giallo"—a northern Italian variant of the country's thriller genre, a surprisingly dangerous domain of tyrant art collectors, car and motorcycle chases, and conceptual double-crosses, all presided over by Italian film music and the lush surfaces of mid-century modern furniture."
Lytle Shaw's books of poetry, prose works and collaborative artwork (with J. Blachly) include Cable Factory 20 (1999), The Lobe (2002), The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse (2008), The Clifford Chadwick Clifford Collection (2011), Selected Shipwrecks (2012) and The Moiré Effect (2012).
Thursday Feb 7 – Charlotte Salter: Writing and Selling Dark Fantasy for Young People
Charlotte graduated from Warwick's BA in English Literature and Writing in 2012, and from the MA in Writing in 2015. Her debut novel, The Bone Snatcher, started life as her BA long project. Both The Bone Snatcher and her second novel for young readers, Where the Woods End, are published by Penguin Random House in the US and abroad.
Thursday Feb 14 – CANCELLED
Thursday Feb 21 – Kirsty Gunn
Kirsty Gunn was born in 1960 in New Zealand and educated at Queen Margaret College and Victoria University, Wellington, and at Oxford, where she completed an M.Phil. After moving to London she worked as a freelance journalist.
Her fiction includes the acclaimed Rain (1994), the story of an adolescent girl and the break-up of her family, for which she won a London Arts Board Literature Award; The Keepsake (1997), the fragmented narrative of a young woman recalling painful memories; and Featherstone (2002), a story concerned with love in all its variety. Her short stories have been included in many anthologies including The Junky's Christmas and Other Yuletide Stories (1994) and The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood (1997).She is also author of This Place You Return To Is Home (1999), a collection of short stories, and in 2001 she was awarded a Scottish Arts Council Writer's Bursary. More recent books are The Boy and the Sea (2006), winner of the 2007 Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award; 44 Things (2007), a book of personal reflections over the course of one year; The Big Music (2012); and Infidelities (2014).
Kirsty Gunn lives in London and Scotland and is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, where she directs the writing programme.
Thursday Feb 28 – Genevieve Carver - Spoken Words: Poetry and the Stage
Genevieve Carver is a Sheffield-based poet who since 2011 has been forging a reputation as a "leading star of the spoken word scene" (Now Then Magazine). Her work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies including Iota, Envoi, and The North, and she has been involved with a number of innovative cross-artform commissions working with film, animation and AR and VR technology. Since 2016 she has been touring the UK with poetry, music and theatre performance project Genevieve Carver & The Unsung. Their first show "The Unsung" won the spoken word award at Buxton Fringe in 2017, and completed a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018. The collective are now working on a new project exploring female experiences in the music industry.
Website: genevievecarver.com
Thursday March 7 – Michael Hulse
Professor Michael Hulse teaches poetry and comparative literature. He has won numerous awards for his poetry, and has earned the praise of Gwyneth Lewis, Simon Armitage, C. K. Stead, the late Peter Porter and many others. His 2013 collection, Half-Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review, where John Kinsella described it as "brilliant", "devastatingly disturbing" and "technically perfect". Reading tours have taken him to the US, Canada and Mexico, India, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Europe. He has been a judge of the Günter Grass Foundation's Albatross Prize, a literary award similar to Britain's Man Booker International, and, with J. M. Coetzee and Susanna Moore, served as an ambassador for Adelaide Writers' Week. In 2009 he co-founded the Hippocrates Prize, for a poem on a medical subject, with Warwick colleague Prof. Donald Singer, and together they organize an annual international symposium on poetry and medicine. In 2011 the Hippocrates initiative took the Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts. For more information on Michael, see the literature pages of the British Council's site.
Thursday March 14 - Heather McCalden
Heather McCalden is a multidisciplinary artist currently residing in London. Originally from Los Angeles, Heather has studied dance at LINES/Ballet, film production at New York University, and photography and performance at the Royal College of Art.
Heather's work has been exhibited at Roulette Intermedium (NYC), Pierogi Gallery (Brooklyn), National Sawdust (Brooklyn), Zabludowicz Collection (London), Testbed 1 (London), Flux Dubai, and StudioRCA (London). She was awarded the Fiona Mee grant to attend the Emerging Writer's Intensive at Banff Centre for the Arts in 2017, and returned to the Banff Centre in 2018 as part of their Late Summer Writer's Residency. Latter this month, her film "Perhaps" will screen alongside Reena Esmail's musical composition of the same name at Seattle Symphony. She is currently working on a book about viral culture.
For more information please visit: heathermccalden.com
Autumn Term 2018
Thursday Oct 4 – Prano Bailey-Bond: Approaches to Genre
Prano is an award-winning director/writer with a strong body of short films and music videos. Her work invokes imaginative worlds, fusing a dark vocabulary with eerie allure. Her horror/thriller, NASTY, has screened at over 100 festivals, collecting awards globally, was BIFA long-listed and noted as one of the top horror shorts of 2016. She was selected by Film4 to direct episode one of their Fright Bites series for All4; SHORTCUT, which toured with The Final Girls' We Are The Weirdosprogram around the UK, after premiering at Sitges Film Festival. She is currently in late-stage development on her debut feature, CENSOR, a psychological horror supported by the BFI, Ffilm Cymru Wales and Creative England. CENSOR was selected for this year's Frontieres Forum at Cannes Film Festival. Prano has been part of various industry development programmes including BFI NETWORK@LFF, which sought to identify original new voices, iconoclasts and risk takers, and the Berlinale Talents programme at Berlin Film Festival. She is represented for Film and Television by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates.
Thursday Oct 11 – Ian Long (Euroscript)
Ian is a writer, teacher, script editor and story consultant whose recent writing projects include an epic animated feature based on Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and a contemporary psychological thriller. Both are slated for imminent production. Ian has recently written and produced his own short film.
He has worked as a consultant for the UK Film Council's Premiere and New Cinema Funds, the First Film Foundation, the Script Factory and many other bodies and producers. He is currently overseeing a horror feature to be shot on location in Italy, developing a science fiction feature with a leading director and working on a collection of short stories.
For Euroscript Ian heads up Consultancy and teaches Genre workshops - Horror, Science Fiction and Thrillers with a special side order of Creating Fear in Cinema. Additionally he teaches script reading and assessment.
Thursday Oct 18 – Sally Rooney - CANCELLED
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin. She is the youngest ever winner of the Sunday Times PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Her first novel Conversations with Friends was a Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard Book of the Year, receiving the most mentions in the end of year round-ups for a debut book in 2017. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, London Review of Books and Granta. Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2017. She is the editor of The Stinging Fly.
(Follow her @sallyrooney).
Thursday Oct 25 – Will Eaves: Voice, Mind, Literature: Alan Turing, Murmur, and the problem of other people
Will Eaves is an Associate Professor in the Writing Programme and the author of five novels and two books of poetry. Murmur (CB Editions) was published in March and has been shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize. For seventeen years he was the Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. His poems, stories and criticism have appeared in many journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, the TLS, the Yale Review, and the New Statesman. He helped found the Brixton Review of Books and is a contributing columnist.
Thursday Nov 1 – David Vann: How To Get In Trouble With Your Sister
Published in 23 languages, David Vann's internationally-bestselling books have won 14 prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and appeared on 83 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He has been featured in 80 international literary festivals and had book tours in 29 countries. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men's Health, Men's Journal, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, Elle UK, Esquire UK, Esquire Russia, National Geographic Adventure, Writer's Digest, McSweeney's, and other magazines and newspapers. A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L'Heureux fellow, he holds degrees from Stanford and Cornell and is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.
Thursday Nov 8 – Lettice Franklin: The Path to Publication
Lettice Franklin is the Commissioning Editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, building a list of literary fiction and narrative nonfiction. At W&N and 4th Estate before that, she has worked with authors including Paraic O'Donnell, Hermione Hoby, Anna Freeman, Joan Didion, Katherine Heiny, Lena Dunham, Claire Lowdon, Rivka Galchen, Anjali Joseph, Craig Brown and Judith Claire Mitchell.
The talk will cover the path to publication, what editors look for and a consideration of the publishing landscape today. Don't miss it!
(more on Weidenfeld & Nicolson here)
Thursday Nov 15 – Sophie Mackintosh: Reimagining Dystopias
Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales in 1988, and is currently based in London. Her fiction and poetry has been published in Granta Magazine, The White Review and The Stinging Fly, amongst others. Her short story 'Grace' was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story 'The Running Ones' won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016.
Sophie's debut novel The Water Cure was published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in Spring 2018 and it will be published by Doubleday in the US in early 2019.
Thursday Nov 22 – Matvei Yankelevich: Currents of Authenticity and Professionalization: Ugly Duckling Presse and Small Press Publishing in the Early 21st Century
Matvei Yankelevich's books include Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt (Black Square), Alpha Donut (United Artists), and Boris by the Sea (Octopus). His translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received a National Translation Award. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series and currently serves as managing editor. He teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
(more on Ugly Duckling Presse here)
Thursday Nov 29 – Celia Hawkesworth: The Winner of the 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
Translator Celia Hawkesworth is the winner of the 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for Daša Drndić's Belladonna (Maclehose Press, 2017), and one of the pre-eminent translators of Croatian literature with almost 40 titles to her name, including works by Dubravka Ugrešić and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić. Celia Hawkesworth taught Serbian and Croatian language and literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, from 1971 to 2002, and since retiring has devoted herself full-time to translation. She has been the recipient of the Dereta Book of the Year Award and the Heldt Prize for the best translation by a woman in Slavic studies. She has also twice been shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
Thursday Dec 6 – Micha Frazer-Carroll: Writing and Liberation
Micha Frazer-Carroll is currently working for the Huffington Post. She is also Arts and Culture Editor at gal-dem, an online and print magazine written by women of colour and non binary people of colour for all to explore. gal-dem took over the Guardian Weekend magazine back in August: every word, photograph and illustration that featured in the magazine on August 11 was created by a woman or non-binary person of colour. Micha is also editor-in-chief of Blueprint, a magazine that focuses on mental health. Micha will be talking about race, feminism, mental health, disability, and writing around that, not to mention breaking into journalism as a marginalised person without selling out.
Summer Term 2018
Thursday April 26 – Samuel Dodson and Daniel Sutherland: nothingintherulebook.com
Nothing in the Rulebook is a creative collective and a community of writers and artists founded to support new projects. Our 'Creatives in profile' interview series features long interviews with award-winning writers and artists. We publish original fiction, poetry, blogs and essays. We also run regular in-house projects, such as 'Haikus for the NHS'. We're always looking for contributors and supporters to help in our creative endeavours. More information can be found at www.nothingintherulebook.com
Samuel Dodson is a writer and editor based in London, and a communications manager in the civil service. His short stories have won, or been shortlisted for, a number of awards, including the Almond Press Short Story Award, Bare Fiction Award, and Bath Flash Fiction Award. Samuel's stories have been published in a variety of small anthologies and his essays have appeared in Litro Magazine and Collective Exile. He founded Nothing in the Rulebook with Daniel Sutherland, in 2015. Daniel is an Irish playwright and short story writer. He is the Media Officer for the British Medical Association. A former journalist, his plays have been performed in London, Coventry, Belfast, Dublin and his home town of Warrenpoint.
Thursday May 3 – Jean Boase-Beier: After the Holocaust: Volker von Törne's Poetry of Guilt.
We tend to think of Holocaust poetry as poetry written by predominantly Jewish victims of the Holocaust in camps or ghettos, or maybe by survivors in exile. But a great deal of Holocaust poetry does not fit these criteria. The poet Volker von Törne's father was in the SS, and von Törne went on to work with survivors of the Holocaust. His poetry starts from the assumption that recognizing the guilt of his own nation is essential. But his sense of guilt is also very personal. I have recently published the first English translation of his poetry, Memorial to the Future. I shall give some background on the Holocaust, on the poet and his context, and read from the work.
Jean Boase-Beier is a translator of German poetry, and has published translations of the work of Ernst Meister, Rose Ausländer, and Volker von Törne. She is translations editor at Arc Publications, for whom she edits four series of bilingual poetry books. She is Professor Emerita of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she founded the MA in Literary Translation in 1992 and ran it until 2015. Her academic work focuses on translation, style and poetry, and especially on the translation of Holocaust poetry; publications include A Critical Introduction to Translation Studies (2011, Bloomsbury); Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust (2015, Bloomsbury) and the co-edited Translating Holocaust Lives (2017, Bloomsbury). Following on from an AHRC project 'Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust', Jean is currently collecting less well-known Holocaust poetry for an anthology to be published in 2019.
Thursday May 10 – Stephen Collis and Patrick Barron: Uncommon Solidarities: Writing, Landscape, Resistance
Stephen Collis's many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), DECOMP (with Jordan Scott—Coach House 2013), and Once in Blockadia (Talon Books 2016—nominated for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature). He has also written two books of literary criticism, on poets Susan Howe and Phyllis Webb, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, and a novel. Almost Islands is a forthcoming memoir, and a long poem, Sketch of a Poem I Will Not Have Written, is in progress. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Patrick Barron is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, where he co-directs the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program and teaches courses in environmental literature, translation studies, and poetry. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (Routledge); Haiku for a Season, Haiku per una stagione, by Andrea Zanzotto (Chicago); The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto (Chicago); and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (Italica). A critical edition of Gianni Celati's Towards the River's Mouth (Lexington) is forthcoming in 2019.
This event is co-sponsored by the Critical Environments research cluster in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies.
Spring Term 2018
Thursday January 11 – Sarah Moss
Sarah Moss began her academic career as a Romanticist, publishing on food and gender in Romantic-era women's fiction (Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women's Fiction) and on the influence of Arctic travel writing on Romantic poetry. Her first novel, Cold Earth (Granta, 2009), developed from her doctoral research. Since then, she has published four more novels (Night Waking, Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children, The Tidal Zone: all with Granta), three of which have been shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize, and a travel book/memoir about a year in Iceland with her family, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland, which was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Her next novel, Ghost Wall, will be published later this year.
Thursday January 18 – Mog Harris
Mog Harris is Warwick born and bred. She trained at Central School of Speech and Drama and has designed extensively for the theatre in London. She has worked for a youth charity in the UK and Rome. In Paris she learnt French, looked after two small children, sold art materials in the 6ème arrondissement, and got up very early to sell organic fruit and veg. On a Christmas visit to France in 2014, her parents mentioned that Warwick's independent bookshop was up for sale. Mog and her partner Pauline shared a look over the dinner table and the deal was done in early 2015. Since their takeover of the bookshop, they have twice won the Wellcome Collection's Incurably Curious Window Display competition and received a James Paterson Grant. Pauline was shortlisted for Young Bookshop Manager of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2016.
Thursday January 25 – Daniel Piper
Daniel Piper is a comedian, writer, and national poetry slam champion. He has been seen and heard on national TV and radio, and across Europe at festivals including Latitude, Bestival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Trieste International Poetry Festival. He has written and performed two hit Edinburgh Fringe shows, Daniel Piper Is In Four Gangs (2016) and Daniel Piper's Day Off (2017). Daniel won the 2017 Scottish National Poetry Slam and came second in the world championships in Paris the same year. He has written for many publications (including The Skinny and The Alarmist) and will publish his first book of comic poems and short stories in 2018.
Thursday February 1 – Nancy Campbell
Nancy Campbell is a writer and book artist, whose recent work responds to polar and marine environments. Her poetry collection Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016) relates her experiences while writer-in-residence at the most northern museum in the world. Artist's books such as How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award 2013) and the participatory live lit project The Polar Tombola challenge contemporary notions of the printed page. Her memoir The Library of Ice will be published by Scribner UK in 2018.
Thursday February 8 – M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison is a pioneering figure in the development of post-war fiction in English. His eleven novels (including In Viriconium, The Course of the Heart, Climbers and Light) and five short-story collections bring political urgency and a literary-critical sensibility to popular genres: modern science-fiction and fantasy, nature writing and horror. He won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Climbers (1989), the James Tipree Jr Award for Light (2002), and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Nova Swing (2007). He reviews fiction for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. He will be reading from his acclaimed new short-story collection, You Should Come With Me Now (2017).
Thursday February 15 – Laura Williams
Laura Williams is an agent at Peters Fraser and Dunlop, where she has been working since leaving Oxford with a degree in Classics in 2011. She is actively building a fiction list and a small non-fiction list. She is looking for literary fiction, commercial fiction, psychological thrillers and high-concept contemporary young adult, as well as narrative non-fiction of all types, with a focus on mental health. Her taste is dark: she loves gothic, ghost stories, horror, anything sinister. She also loves books that make her cry: a big love story or an intense family drama.
Thursday February 22 – EVENT CANCELLED OWING TO UCU STRIKE ACTION
Thursday March 1 – Lara Pawson
Lara Pawson was born in London, a city she left at sixteen for a hamlet in Somerset. She has also lived in Abidjan, Accra, Bamako, Johannesburg, Luanda and the Alpes-Maritimes. This Is the Place to Be (CB Editions), her second book, has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the PEN Ackerley Prize and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing. Her first book, In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre (2014), was longlisted for the George Orwell Prize. She worked for the BBC World Service between 1998 and 2007. Her journalism, essays and criticism have been widely published.
Thursday March 8 – Dubravka Ugresic
Dubravka Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Yugoslavia and studied Comparative and Russian Literature at the University of Zagreb, where she taught for many years. In 1991, when war broke out, Ugrešić took a firm anti-war stance. Politically ostracised and harassed by the media, she left Croatia in 1993 and is now based in Amsterdam. Translations of her work into English include The Ministry of Pain (2006), Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009) and Europe in Sepia (2014). In 2009 she was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
Thursday March 15 – Sam Jordison
Sam Jordison is a publisher, journalist, and author. He is co-director of the award-winning independent publisher Galley Beggar Press. He writes about books for The Guardian. His own non-fiction books include Enemies Of The People, Literary London (with Eloise Millar) and the best-selling Crap Towns series.
Autumn Term 2017
Thursday October 5 – Stephen Vincent
Stephen Vincent's career combines poetry, essays, art and book publishing. His hybrid practice reflects an immersion in the physical environment, contemporary society and politics. His haptic (based on the sense of touch) drawing – sometimes called "Poetry by Other Means" – directly engages the "vibrational fields" of performance and place: poetry readings, work with musicians, urban street sites, and the Sierra Mountains of California. He is the author of more than twelve books of poetry and the publisher of Momo's Press and Bedford Arts; his artist books are collected by museums and libraries worldwide. Vincent will read from and share the artwork in his most recent volume: The Last 100 Days of the Presidency of Barack Obama (October 13 – January 20, 2017).
Thursday October 12 – Katy Whitehead
Katy Whitehead is a graduate of the University of Warwick's Writing Programme (BA and MA) and winner of the 2017 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Adventures in Synthetic Fun, a book-length work-in-progress. Katy was shortlisted for Myriad Editions' First Drafts competition and Penned in the Margins' Generation Txt, and longlisted for a Sky Academy Arts Scholarship and the Mslexia novel competition. She worked in publishing for five years, most recently as a commissioning editor of books by Lena Dunham and T. Geronimo Johnson. She lives in London with her husband and mentors regularly at the Ministry of Stories.
Thursday October 19 – Lee Ann Brown
Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan, raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, and attended Brown University. She is the author of Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stephane Bouquet as Autre Archère (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015); In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women's poetry. She is a professor at St. John's University, and is this year's Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University.
Thursday, October 26 – Harriet Paige
Harriet Paige was born in 1979 and grew up in Devon. She studied English and American Literature at Warwick and returned in 2005 to do an MA in Writing. Since then, she has continued to develop her writing alongside working as an interiors journalist and bringing up her three children. Man With a Seagull on His Head, published by Bluemoose Books, is her first novel and has been shortlisted for the Guardian's Not the Booker Prize (voting open now).
Thursday November 2 – Stefan Tobler
Stefan Tobler is the publisher of the award-winning independent publishing house And Other Stories, and a translator. And Other Stories authors include the Man Booker-shortlisted Deborah Levy, the Guardian First Book-shortlisted Juan Pablo Villalobos; Joanna Walsh, Ivan Vladislavic and Yuri Herrera. Stefan's translations of Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva and Raduan Nassar's A Cup of Rage are both Penguin Classics. He will be enthusing about start-ups, finding writers and publishing them, submissions / acquisitions, and "new models" in literary publishing.
Thursday November 9 – Jack McGowan and six years of Shoot from the Lip
Jack McGowan is a performance poet with over a decade of experience in the UK spoken word scene. He has performed at a number of high profile events including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, StAnza International Poetry Festival, and Ilkley Literature Festival. His poetry appears in a number of online and print publications and he has been interviewed by major outlets such as the BBC regarding his work on UK spoken word. Jack studied his undergraduate degree in English and Creative Writing at Warwick University and returned in 2013 to conduct doctoral research for a Ph.D. in contemporary performance poetics. He is now a tutor on the Warwick Writing Programme and hosts 'Shoot from the Lip' - one of the largest spoken word collectives in the West Midlands.
Shoot from the Lip was founded in 2013 by Jack McGowan and Zena Agha. Over the last six years, it has evolved from humble beginnings in a back-alley bar, becoming a prominent fixture on the West Midlands spoken word scene. SFTL Slam events regularly attract audiences of 80-100, combining Warwick University students and local community poets and spoken word enthusiasts. All events are free, and performers are always welcome, regardless of experience. Previous performers have gone on to be shortlisted for major spoken word awards, compose poetry films for the Guardian, and feature in episodes of Holby City. https://www.facebook.com/shootfromthelip.warwick/
Thursday November 16 – Zodwa Nyoni
Zodwa Nyoni is a playwright and poet based in Leeds. As winner of the Channel 4 Playwright's Scheme she was Writer-in-Residence at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. She has previously been Apprentice Poet-in-Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival (2013), Leeds Kirkgate Market (2012) and Writer-in-Residence at I Love West Leeds Festival (2010). She is currently under commission at The Tricycle Theatre and Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Thursday November 23 – Rishi Dastidar
Rishi Dastidar is a fellow of The Complete Works, a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine, a member of Malika's Poetry Kitchen collective, and also serves as a chair of the writer development organization Spread The Word. His debut collection Ticker-tape is published by Nine Arches Press, founded by Warwick alumna Jane Commane.
Thursday November 30 – Gonzalo Garcia Ceron and Preti Taneja
Gonzalo Garcia Ceron studied English and American Literature at the University of Kent, where he also taught Creative Writing. He is now a Teaching Fellow in the Warwick Writing Programme. His first novel, We Are The End, reflects his interest in the relationship between video games, digital culture, and the construction of narrative. It is published by Galley Beggar Press and has been shortlisted for the EIBF First Book Award 2017.
Preti Taneja's debut novel We That Are Young, a response both to King Lear and to the rising religious fascism of contemporary India, is published by Galley Beggar Press. Her novella Kumkum Malhotra won the Gatehouse Press New Fiction Prize in 2014 and she writes for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and Index, among other journals. Preti is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University. After a decade of reporting on minority and refugee rights in Jordan, Sweden, East Africa and the Balkans, she is now investigating the protection of cultural rights in conflict and post-conflict situations.
Thursday December 7 – Will Eaves
Will Eaves's most recent novel, The Absent Therapist (2014), was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. His collection of poetry, memoir and criticism, The Inevitable Gift Shop (2016), was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. A new novel of linked tales, Murmur, will be published in 2018; the title story was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2017.
Summer Term 2017
Thursday May 11th - Henry Barnes
Henry Barnes is a film and music journalist with 10 years experience in the industry. An ex-Guardian staffer and the former editor of theguardian.com/film, he now works at the British Film Institute as the BFI's Digital Editor. He writes, presents, produces and edits text, audio and video.
Thursday May 18th - Stephen Aryan
Stephen Aryan is the award-winning fantasy author of The Age of Darkness trilogy (Battlemage, Bloodmage, Chaosmage) from Orbit books, published worldwide in English. His books have also been translated into French and German. His fourth novel Mageborn, published in October 2017, begins a new fantasy trilogy, the Age of Dread. He lives in the West Midlands with his partner and two cats and describes himself as an ageing podcaster, lapsed gamer and wannabe forest ranger. Learn about the unique challenges and opportunities facing modern writers of fantasy fiction.
Wednesday May 24th - Lydia Cacho and Anabel Hernandez
The Sorrows of Mexico, winner of the English PEN Award, is a crucial collection of writings from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, laying bare the violence and corruption behind the murders of over a hundred Mexican journalists. Lydia Cacho and Anabel Hernandez, two of the contributors, will talk about the book and the challenges and very real dangers of this kind of investigative non-fiction.
Thursday June 1st - Charlotte Salter
A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme returns to discuss the publication of her debut novel. Charlotte Salter began writing her first novel for young adults while an undergraduate at Warwick, studying English and Creative Writing. She went to study the MA Writing at Warwick, and her debut, The Bone Snatcher, was published earlier this year by Dial Books. https://charlotte-salter.com/
Spring Term 2017
Week 1: Thursday January 12th - Claire Jane Carter
Claire Jane Carter is a graduate of the MA programme at the University of East Anglia, and she is poet, essayist, and filmmaker. Her most recent film collaboration, Operation Moffat, has won numerous prizes at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival, Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival, and Sheffield Adventure Film Festival. She now lives in Sheffield.
Week 2: Thursday January 19th - Michael Hulse
Described by Gwyneth Lewis as "a formidable poet", Michael Hulse has won several awards for his poetry, and reading tours have taken him to Canada, the US and Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, India, and several European countries. He has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by W. G. Sebald, Goethe and Rilke, and has worked in publishing, television and universities. His co-edited anthology The Twentieth Century in Poetry was described by The Guardian as "magnificent", and his latest book of poems, Half-Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year by John Kinsella.
Week 3: Thursday January 26th - Gonzalo Garcia Ceron
Born in Santiago, Chile in 1986, Gonzalo Garcia Ceron studied English and American Literature at Kent in Canterbury, where he also went on to do an MA in Postcolonial Studies. He taught Creative Writing there for four years. He now teaches at Warwick. He has published short stories with Galley Beggar Press (Longlisted for the 2016 Short Story Prize), who will now publish We Are The End, a novel heavily influenced by his interest in the relationship between video games, digital culture and everyday constructions of narrative. He is currently working on Always 3 Days, a creative non-fiction book based on his experiences travelling and settling abroad.
Week 4: Thursday February 2nd - Nelle Andrew
Nelle Andrew studied at Warwick University and then Trinity College, Dublin before working at Pan Macmillan. She then moved to agenting and has been at PFD since 2009. Before becoming a literary agent, she was a published author of fiction. Her clients are a varied list from Sunday Times Bestsellers in non fiction, to literary to dystopia, historical and crime. Her speciality is début authors due to her personal background in this area.
Week 5: Thursday February 9th - Jane Commane
Jane Commane is a Coventry-born poet, editor, writer, tutor and a general maker and doer of various things word and writing related. She has been published in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, Litter, Anon, Horizon Review and Gists & Piths and in several anthologies including Sherb: New Urban Writing from Coventry (Heaventree Press 2006), Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt Publishing, 2011) and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon Press 2012). She is the Editor and Director of Nine Arches Press, an independent poetry press based in Coventry.
Week 6: Thursday February 16th - Carrie Plitt
Before joining Felicity Bryan as an agent in 2016, Carrie worked for five years at Conville & Walsh Literary Agency. At Felicity Bryan she is actively building a list of non-fiction and fiction clients, with a focus on debut authors. She also hosts a monthly books radio show and podcast called Literary Friction.
Week 7: Thursday February 23rd - Lucy Brydon
Lucy is a novelist, screenwriter, and director. Her first novel, Shanghai Passenger, was published in September 2015 by Blue Mark Books. Her debut feature film, sick(er), was commissioned by the Film London Microwave Initiative in May, 2016, with funding from the BBC and British Film institute. It will go into production in 2017. She teaches screenwriting on the university of warwick's creative writing programme. Lucy trained on the undergraduate writing programme at the University of Warwick, and in directing on the MFA programme at the University of Columbia in new york.
Week 8: Thursday March 2nd - Nikesh Shukla
Nikesh Shukla's debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was published by Quartet Books and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011. In 2013 he released a novella about food with Galley Beggars Press, The Time Machine, donating his royalties to Rot Castle Lung Cancer Foundation. The book won Best Novella at the Sabotage Awards. His second novel, Meatspace, was published by The Friday Project. It's been lauded by the New Statesman, BBC Radio 4, the Independent on Sunday, and the Daily Mail. Most recently, Nikesh is the editor of the essay collection, The Good Immigrant, where 21 British writers of colour discuss race and immigration in the UK.
Week 9: Thursday March 9th - Simon Pettet
Simon Pettet is an English-born poet and long-time resident of New York's Lower East Side. He has compiled and edited Selected Art Writings (1998) of the poet James Schuyler and collaborated with photographer-filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt on Conversations about Everything and Talking Pictures. Pettet's Selected Poems (1995) is still available from Talisman House, along with his most recent work, More Winnowed Fragments (2006).
Week 10: Thursday March 16th - Irenosen Okojie
Irenosen Okojie is a writer and Arts Project Manager. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, won a Betty Trask award. Her work has been featured in The Observer,The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Ben Okri as a dynamic writing talent to watch and was featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London's exciting new authors. Her short story collection, Speak Gigantular, is published by Jacaranda Books.
AutumnTerm 2016
Week 1: Thursday October 6th - CA Conrad
C A Conrad's childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of 9 books of poetry and essays. The latest, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books) is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, and Ucross. For his books and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
Week 2: Thursday October 13th -Preti Taneja
Preti Taneja is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University, working in the department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and the Centre for Human Rights in Practice. She has previously been research fellow in global Shakespeare at Queen Mary, University of London, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2014. She writes about human rights, contemporary India, literature and culture and is the editor of Visual Verse, an online anthology of art and words. Her first novel, We That Are Young, will be published in 2017 by Galley Beggar Press. http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk/
Week 3: Thursday October 20th -Jonathan Skinner
Jonathan Skinner is a poet. His interests include Contemporary Poetry and Poetics; Ecocriticism and Environmental Studies; Ethnopoetics; Sound Studies; Critical Theory; and Translation. He is founder and editor of ecopoetics, a journal which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology.
Week 4: Thursday October 27th - Carlos Gamerro
Carlos Gamerro was born in Buenos Aires in 1962. He graduated in Arts from the University of Buenos Aires, where he served as a professor until 2002. He is a novelist, critic, and translator. In 2007 was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge and in 2008 participated the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. in 2011 it premiered at the Teatro Alvear in Buenos Aires his play the Islands, directed by Alejandro Tantanian. He was co-author of the catalog of the 11th International Biennial of Lyon (2011). In 2012 he participated in the International Congress of Writers of Edinburgh. His novels have been translated into German, French, English and Turkish. http://www.carlosgamerro.com/
Week 5: Thursday November 3rd - Paul Cooper
Paul graduated from the University of Warwick in 2011 and spent most of the next year living in Sri Lanka, teaching English in schools and travelling the country, spending time among the ruins both ancient and modern. He also worked in Atlantis, a volunteer bookshop in Santorini, but came home to study on the creative writing MA at the UEA. He rode out the financial crisis there, doing internships and placements at literary magazines, also working as an archivist and freelance book reviewer. His novel, River of Ink, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.
Week 6: Thursday November 10th - Tim Leach
Tim Leach is a novelist, specialising in historical fiction. His first novel, The Last King of Lydia, was published in 2013 and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize that year. A sequel, The King and the Slave was published in 2014. He is a graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, where he now teaches as an Assistant Professor.
Week 7: Thursday November 17th - David Vann
David is a novelist. His work has been translated into many languages. A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L'Heureux fellow, he holds degrees from Stanford and Cornell and is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick, and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.
Week 8: Thursday November 24th - David Morley
David Morley won the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry in 2016 for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems and a Cholmondeley Award for his contribution to poetry. His collections include The Gypsy and the Poet, a PBS Recommendation and Morning Star Book of the Year; Enchantment, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year; The Invisible Kings, a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the year. A dramatic poem The Death of Wisdom Smith, Prince of Gypsies has been published by The Melos Press. He was one of the judges of the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2013 Foyle Young Poets. He is Professor at Warwick University and Monash University, Melbourne.
(The scheduled session with Claire Jane Carter is postponed. Claire Jane Carter is a a graduate of the MA programme at the University of East Anglia, and she is poet, essayist, and filmmaker. Her most recent film collaboration, Operation Moffat, has won numerous prizes at the Kendal Mountain Film Festival, Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival, and Sheffield Adventure Film Festival. She now lives in Sheffield.)
Week 9: Thursday December 1st - Tim Leach
Novelist Tim Leach will be giving a talk on finding an agent, using social media, and other challenges facing the modern author. All are welcome to attend.
(The scheduled session with Nikesh Shukla has been postponed. Nikesh Shukla's debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was published by Quartet Books and shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2011. In 2013 he released a novella about food with Galley Beggars Press, The Time Machine, donating his royalties to Rot Castle Lung Cancer Foundation. The book won Best Novella at the Sabotage Awards. His second novel, Meatspace, was published by The Friday Project. It's been lauded by the New Statesman, BBC Radio 4, the Independent on Sunday, and the Daily Mail. Most recently, Nikesh is the editor of the essay collection, The Good Immigrant, where 21 British writers of colour discuss race and immigration in the UK. http://www.nikesh-shukla.com/)
Week 10: Thursday December 8th - Irenosen Okojie
Irenosen Okojie is a writer and Arts Project Manager. Her debut novel, Butterfly Fish, won a Betty Trask award. Her work has been featured in The Observer,The Guardian, the BBC and the Huffington Post amongst other publications. Her short stories have been published internationally. She was presented at the London Short Story Festival by Ben Okri as a dynamic writing talent to watch and was featured in the Evening Standard Magazine as one of London's exciting new authors. Her short story collection, Speak Gigantular, is published by Jacaranda Books. Twitter: @IrenosenOkojie
Summer Term 2016
Week 2: Thursday 5th May - THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED [16 June].
Week 3: Thursday 12th May
Week 4: Thursday 19th May
We know that Donald Rumsfeld's 'known unknowns' remark at a White House briefing in February 2002, during the manufacture of the case for invading Iraq, has several possible sources, among them D. H. Lawrence's war poem "New Heaven and Earth": "Now here was I, new awakened, with my hand stretching out / and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown …" In this talk-reading mashup I want to articulate Rumsfeld's neoliberal poetry with the ruins of Iraq, taking in the modes of poetry as prophecy, as testimony, as waste of time. "The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things," argued Wallace Stevens in the lead-up to a previous war. Is that (still) true?
A free bookmaking workshop, open to students, staff and friends of the Warwick Writing Program. Please bring a laptop (if possible) and/or a digital file (on a memory stick), with your text (can be as little as one poem or short text, or as many as 36 pages of work, in any genre or mix of genres), and bring materials for a cover or container/ book structure of any kind. (Stiff cardstock is ideal, but handmade or unusual papers, cardboard, even cereal boxes, can be interesting.) This is an excellent use for text from portfolios and final (personal writing) projects! (Also, if you can, bring some linen thread, available at most haberdashers, and a needle large enough for this thicker-than-usual thread.) We will cover the basics of chapbook design, layout and assemblage and also play with inventive book forms. Paper cutter (guillotine) and long reach stapler will be provided. It would be helpful if, before the workshop, participants could explore some of these online chapbook-making resources and guides:
WORKSHOP LIMITED TO 12 PARTICIPANTS / RSVP to Jonathan Skinner to secure a place / firstname.lastname@example.com
Spring Term (2016)
Week 1: Thursday 14 January
Simon Turner
Simon Turner's first collection, You Are Here, appeared in 2007; his second, Difficult Second Album, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. His work has appeared widely both in print and online, most recently in the Bloodaxe anthology Dear World and Everyone in It, edited by Nathan Hamilton. For some years he coedited, with George Ttoouli, the currently dormant blogzine Gists and Piths, which focussed on the discussion and publication of contemporary poetry. His most recent publication is a pamphlet from Seren, entitled Works on Paper, and he is currently working towards a third full collection.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to illness, Tim Atkins, originally scheduled to present on this date, has had to cancel. Poet Simon Turner will be presenting in his stead.
CANCELED: Tim Atkins
Tim Atkins is a British poet, editor, and lecturer in creative writing at the University of East London. He has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently Folklore with Salt (one of the Daily Telegraph's poetry books of the year for 2008) and Petrarch Collected Atkins with Crater Press (a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2014, and a book of the year at Salon.com). Since 2000, he has been editor of the online poetry journal onedit, which was selected by The British Library as one of the key poetry websites in its poetry archive. Tim's play The World's Furious Song Flows Through My Skirt was performed at the PolyPly Innovative Writing series in 2011 and was published by Stoma in June 2014. His work has been translated into Latvian, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, and Catalan, and has been read--in support of Pussy Riot--in The Houses of Parliament.
Week 2: Thursday 21 January
Julia Forster
Born in 1978 in the Midlands, Julia has worked as a waitress in Chartres, a nanny in Milan and a magician's assistant in Brooklyn. She studied at the University of Warwick where she was awarded the Derek Walcott Prize for Creative Writing. Julia has also worked in the publishing industry in Aberystwyth, Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and London, including a two-year stint as an assistant in a literary agency in Soho where jobs included sifting submissions from authors each morning. More recently, she worked for the literary magazine New Welsh Review. Julia now works for Literature Wales where she sits on their bursary panel, helping to award bursaries to both emerging and established writers. She herself received a bursary in 2011 which enabled her to begin her debut novel, What a Way to Go, which was published in January 2016. She lives in mid Wales with her husband and two children.
Week 3: Thursday 28 January
Clive Bush
Clive Bush is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at King's College London. He has also taught at the University of Warwick at the Institute for American Studies, and at the University of London. He has published numerous books on 19th and 20th century American literature and cultural studies, and many books of poetry, the most recent of which is Lingerings of the Large Day.
Week 4: Thursday 4 February
Gevi Carver
Genevieve Carver is a Sheffield-based poet whose work illuminates the realities of everyday life in a lively and rhythmical style. She performs regularly at events across the country, often accompanying herself on piano. Past appearances have included the Edinburgh Fringe and Shambala music festival, and her written work has appeared in Iota, Envoi and Now Then and other magazines. She has won prizes in the Troubadour and York Literature Festival poetry competitions, and has been long-listed for the National Poetry Competition. This year she was a semi-finalist in the Hammer & Tongue UK National Poetry Slam.
Week 5: Thursday 11 February
Mez Packer
Mez Packer attended Warwick University where she studied Philosophy and Literature. During the 80s she lived in Europe and sang jazz in bars and nightclubs. In the 90s she brought up two children, traveled widely in Asia and the Far East and began a career in the media, working first as a Broadcast Journalist for the BBC, then as a magazine editor and more recently a lecturer in Media and Communication. Both Mez's novels – Among Thieves and The Game is Altered – are published by Tindal Street Press. She lives in Leamington Spa and is Associate Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Coventry University.
Week 6: Thursday 18 February
Lucy Brydon
Lucy Brydon is a Scottish writer, filmmaker and visual artist. Lucy's first novel, Shanghai Passenger, was published in September 2015 by Blue Mark Books. Lucy has written, directed and produced short films, commercials and television dramas in the US, the UK and China – where she lived for several years. Her work has been included in film festivals internationally. Lucy also writes academically on film with a focus on gender and Scottish cinema. She is currently working on her second novel and first feature film, sick(er), which is produced by Lions Den Films. The project was selected for the film London microwave development programme in November, 2015.Lucy trained on the undergraduate writing programme at the University of Warwick, where she gained a first class BA, and in directing on the MFA programme at the University of Columbia in New York.
Week 7: Thursday 25 February
Peter Gizzi
Peter Gizzi is the author of In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011, Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum. His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologised in the USA and abroad. Gizzi's honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and a fellowship from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005), amongst other awards. In 2011 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. His editing projects have included the influential journal o·blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993), The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995), The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998), and with Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). From 2007 to 2011 Gizzi was the Poetry Editor for The Nation. Since 2003, he has been a contributing editor to the journal, Conjunctions. Gizzi is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Week 8: Thursday 3 March
Linda Russo
Linda Russo is the author of Mirth (Chax Press) and Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way (Shearsman Books); a collection of lyrical essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, winner of Subito Press inaugural creative nonfiction prize, is due out imminently. Her reports on Bioregional/Body-Regional poetics, "Emplaced, and local to," are archived at Jacket2. Scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation). She lives in the Columbia River Watershed of the northwestern United States, tends garden plots, and teaches at Washington State University. inhabitorypoetics.blogspot.com
Week 9: Thursday 10 March
Zodwa Nyoni
Zodwa Nyoni is a playwright and poet. She won the Channel 4 Playwrights Scheme and was Writer-in-Residence at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2014. She's previously been: Apprentice Poet-in-Residence at Ilkely Literature Festival (2013), Writer-in-Residence Leeds Kirkgate Market (2012), Writer-in-Residence at I Love West Leeds Festival (2010) and Poet-in-Residence at BBC Radio Leeds (2006). http://zodwanyoni.com/
Week 10: Thursday 17 March
Caroline Wood
Caroline Wood was a film producer before joining the Felicity Bryan Agency in September 2006. She has a select list of literary and high concept fiction authors including a number of top ten bestsellers. She is particularly drawn to novels set in 20th century, stories with a mystery or secret at the heart of them and emotionally engaging stories about family and relationships. Caroline also represents a small number of non-fiction writers. She became a director of Felicity Bryan Associates in 2010.
Autumn Term (2015)
Week 1: Thursday 8 October
Sarah Moss
Sarah is a novelist, travel writer and Associate Professor in the Warwick Writing Programme. Her work has been translated into several languages. Her most recent book is Signs for Lost Children (Granta, 2015).
Week 2: Thursday 15 October
Tim Leach
Tim is a novelist and a graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme. He currently teaches on the Warwick Writing Programme. He is the author of two novels, The Last King of Lydia and The King and the Slave.
Week 3: Thursday 22 October
David Vann
David is a novelist. His work has been translated into many languages. A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L'Heureux fellow, he holds degrees from Stanford and Cornell and is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick, and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.
Week 4: Thursday 29 October
Alyson Hallett
Alyson is a poet. Her most recent book is On Ridegrove Hill (2015). She has also published short stories , written drama for Sky television and BBC Radio 4, and often works in collaboration with artists and sculptors on public art projects.
Week 5: Thursday 5 November
Will Eaves
Will Eaves is the author of four novels – most recently, The Absent Therapist (2014), shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize – and a collection of poetry. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1995 to 2011. The Inevitable Gift Shop (poems and essays) will be published next year.
Week 6: Thursday 12 November
Ana Luísa Amaral
Ana is a poet and a Professor at the University of Porto, where she is a senior researcher and co-director of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa. Co-author (with Ana Gabriela Macedo) of the Dictionary of Feminist Criticism (2005), she is also a translator and a profilic writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Ana Luísa will be joined by her English translator Margaret Jull Costa.
Week 7: Thursday 19 November
Leena Normington
A graduate of the Warwick MA in Writing, Leena joined the publishing industry in 2012 and has worked across export sales, ebooks and marketing. She has just left her role as Publicity Manager at Icon Books to pursue a new role as Creative Producer at Pan Macmillan. She is also a freelancer in video production and has a YouTube channel with 1.2 million hits and 25,000 regular subscribers.
Week 8: Thursday 26 November
Daniel Cullen
After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths in 2010, Daniel was then selected for the Channel 4 4Screenwriting scheme. He currently has projects in development with a number of major UK broadcasters including the BBC, ITV and E4. Daniel will attempt to demystify the murky process of beginning a career in writing for the screen.
Week 9: Thursday 3 December
Rachel Conway
Rachel is an agent with Georgina Capel Associates. Having studied Comparative Literature at King's College, London and worked at various publishers and literary agencies, she joined Georgina Capel in 2010. Rachel is currently expanding her own list of authors and is looking for new non-fiction and fiction projects, including work for children.
Week 10: Thursday 10 December
Max Porter
Max is a commissioning editor at Granta Books, where his authors include Eleanor Catton, Norman Rush, Janet Malcolm, Rebecca Solnit, Sarah Moss, Colin McAdam and Masha Gessen. His début book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers - described as 'part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief' - is published by Faber, and is on the shortlist for the Guardian First Book Award.
Summer Term (2015)
Week 1 Wed. 22nd April
5:00 Meena Kandasamy and S. Anand
Meena Kandasamy is an acclaimed poet, novelist, translator and anti-caste feminist activist; author of The Gypsy Goddess and Ms. Militancy. S. Anand is editor at Navayana, a radical anti-caste publishing house.
"The quarrel you lose to win," an enchanting evening of poetry and song. What is text/textuality? Can translation merely be something from language to language, or is it also from language into another form? How does a poet limit herself when she translates, how does the poet insert himself into a translation? Meena Kandasamy and S. Anand will share with us stories about how two dead poets speak to them. While Meena will be in conversation with Thiruvalluvar, the Tamil bard who is said to have belonged anywhere between 1st century BCE to 6th century CE, Anand will tell us how the work of Kabir, the poet from 15th century Benares, comes to him riding the crests of songs.
(Writers' Room, Milburn House)
Week 3 Tue. 5th May
4:30 Simon Pettet [CANCELLED]
Simon Pettet, as well as being the recent author of As A Bee (Talisman House, 2014) and of Hearth (Talisman House, 2008), is the author of More Winnowed Fragments (Talisman House, 2005), among other poetry collections. Black Sparrow published his Selected Art Writings of James Schuyler in 1999. He is also the author of Talking Pictures (Zoland Books, 1995) and Conversations About Everything (Vehicle Editions, 1987) with the photographer Rudy Burckhardt. British by birth, Pettet is a long-time resident of the Lower East Side in Manhattan.
(Writers' Room, Milburn House)
Week 5 Thu. 21st May
4:00 Rob Halpern
Rob Halpern is the author of a tetralogy published in the USA over the last eight years – Rumored Place (Krupskaya, 2004), Disaster Suites (Palm Press, 2009), Music for Porn (Nightboat Books, 2012), Common Place (Ugly Duckling, 2015) and co-author (with Taylor Brady) of Snow Sensitive Skin (Displaced Press, 2011). The collection [ ———— ]: Placeholder appears in the UK this year (Enitharmon, 2015). Recent essays and translations by Halpern appear in Chicago Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, and The Claudius App, and an essay by Sam Ladkin on the "Placeholder" series can be found online in World Picture Journal 8. Halpern lives between San Francisco and Michigan.
(Writers' Room, Milburn House)
Week 8 Thu. 11th June
1:30 Joshua Clover with Sean Bonney
Poet, critic, and journalist Joshua Clover was born in 1962 in Berkeley, Calif. An alumnus of Boston University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Clover has published three volumes of poetry, Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), The Totality for Kids (UC Press, 2006) and Red Epic (Commune Editions, 2015). His poems have also appeared three times in Best American Poetry, and he has written two books of film and cultural criticism: The Matrix (2005) and 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About (2009). His book Of Riot, a theorization of riot as historical phenomenon, is forthcoming from Verso in 2016. The winner of two Pushcart Prizes, Clover has received an individual NEA grant as well as the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. A former Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley, Clover currently is an associate professor of English literature and critical theory at the University of California, Davis.
Sean Bonney's books include Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (Unkant, 2011), The Commons (Openned, 2011), Document: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos (Barque, 2009), and Baudelaire in English (Veer 2008). His selected poems Letters Against the Firmament will be published later this year, as well as a book of his selected essays. His work has been translated into several languages, and he has performed it at occupations, on demonstrations, in the back-rooms of pubs, in seminar rooms, on picket lines and at international poetry festivals. He lives in Walthamstow, East London.
Spring Term (2015)
Week 1 Thurs. 8th Jan.
1:15 Celia Rees and Will Buckingham
Celia Rees is one of Britain's foremost writers for teenagers with an international readership and reputation. Her novel Witch Child has been translated into 28 languages and has been included in the Booktrust's Ultimate List: The 100 Best Children's Books published in the last 100 years. She has published novels in many other genres, including historical fiction, gothic and speculative fiction. Celia studied Politics and History at the University of Warwick, gained a PGCE and Master's degree at Birmingham University and taught English in Coventry for sixteen years before becoming a full time writer. She is a member of the Society of Authors and lives in Leamington Spa.
Will Buckingham is a Leicester based novelist, philosopher and lecturer. His children book The Snorgh and the Sailor has been translated into several languages and long listed for the UK Literacy Association Book Award. Will's publishing history ranges from fiction and philosophy to his most recent non-fiction guide to novel writing. He has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a Masters degree in anthropology from Durham, a PhD in philosophy from Staffordshire University and started writing fiction seriously when he was in the Tanimbar Islands in Indonesia. Will Buckingham teaches Creative Writing at De Montfort University in Leicester.
Week 2 Thurs. 15th Jan.
1:15 Lisa Jarnot and Jonathan Taylor
Jonathan Taylor is a novelist, memoirist, short-story writer, poet, critic and lecturer. He is the author of the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself and of the novel Entertaining Strangers. He is editor of the anthology Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud, winner of the Saboteur Awards 2013. His poetry collection Musicolepsy and his collection of short stories, Kontakte and Other Stories, were published in 2013. Jonathan is co-founder and co-director of arts organisation and small publisher Crystal Clear Creators. He is General Editor of Hearing Voices Magazine and the Crystal Pamphlets series. With Maria Taylor, he is co-editor of Fizzle & Sizzle. Jonathan studied English Literautre at the University of Warwick and gained a PhD from Loughborough University. He lives in Leicestershire and is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.
Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York in 1967 and studied at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Brown University. Since the mid-1990s she has been a resident of New York City. Co-editor of An Anthology of New (American) Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 1997) and former editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter, she is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt Publishers, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003) and Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008). Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was published by the University of California Press in 2012. A Selected Poems was published by City Lights in May of 2013. Jarnot works as a teacher, writer, and freelance gardener and is a founding member of the Central Park Forest Nursery. She blogs at Defiant Lightness.
Week 3 Thurs 22nd Jan.
1:15 Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Mahendra Solanki
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is an interdisciplinary poet, curator, and academic with a focus on experimental writing and performance. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Poetics and MA in Poetic Practice from Royal Holloway, University of London, a BA (Hons) in English from Oxford University, and studied Applied Poetics at the Bowery Poetry Club, New York and Performance Writing at Naropa, Colorado. She is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing.
Mahendra Solanki is a poet and editor. Since his first collection, Shadows of My Making was published in 1986, his poetry has appeared in magazines, anthologies and in several other volumes, including What You Leave Behind (1996). He was born in Nairobi of Indian parents and his work draws on this background to locate his writing. The Lies We Tell (Shoestring Press, 2014) continues this exploration. As an editor, he published debut collections by Ian Parks and Robert Hamberger among others, as well as shaping the work of more established poets such as Catherine Byron and Martin Mooney. Solanki taught at Nottingham Trent University for 15 years, where he led the undergraduate English and creative-writing programmes. He also directed their long established MA in writing. He has wide experience of working as a writer for the Arts Council, the Arvon Foundation and the Poetry Society, including a year's residency with prisoners in a secure unit. More recently, he worked with First Story, whose mission is to "place acclaimed authors in challenging situations," most notably at the Nottingham Children's Hospital (the first such post in the country) and the Nottingham Academy. Mahendra is a registered psychotherapist and divides his time between treating patients and working as a freelance writer and tutor. He is presently a RLF Fellow at the University of Warwick.
Week 4 Thurs 29th Jan.
1:15 Nia Davies and El Habib Louai (with Hassan Bendouz and Lahoucine Moutaoukil)
Nia Davies's first pamphlet of poems, Then Spree, came out from Salt in 2012. As well as her work with Literature Across Frontiers and with Wales Literature Exchange, Davies's current projects include collaborations with other poets and artists and co-editing the online journal Poems in Which and Solidarity Park Poetry – poems for #resisturkey. She writes poetry, reviews, articles and fiction. Her poems have been published internationally and translated into Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish and Spanish.
El Habib Louai is an Amazigh poet and translator from Taroudant, Morocco, and also a junior high school English teacher at Azzaytoun, Agadir. He articulates the Berber struggle and is active in various projects relating to poetry, spoken word and jazz music. He edited and translated an anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry (Big Bridge Magazine). His poems and literary criticism have been published in various international literary magazines, anthologies, journals and reviews and he has read his work in the UK and USA.
Music: Hassan Bendouz and Lahoucine Moutaouakil are junior high school teachers who also write songs and play music. They focus on local Amazigh traditional music and countryside folklore of southern Morocco, mainly Tachlhit. They are inspired by Amazigh rhythms of Ahwash which they blend with Sufi, jazz and Gnawa music. They consider themselves to be committed artists aspiring to collaborate with international artists for a better world of peace, justice and equality.
Week 5 Thurs 5th Feb.
1:15 Sophie Lister
S.E. (Sophie) Lister is a novelist and non-fiction writer, who grew up in Gloucestershire and graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2009. Her finely-crafted prose spans genres and time periods. Her first novel, Hideous Creatures (Old Street, 2014), takes a journey into the dark heart of colonial America, into what the Guardian describes as a "lush and filmic New World landscape." The story is told through an unusual chronology, with lyrical description and fantastical twists. Her second novel, The Immortals, a time-travelling, philosophical adventure, also is forthcoming from Old Street this year. Alongside her fiction, Sophie writes for various magazines and websites about philosophy and film.
Week 6 Thurs 12th Feb.
1:15 George Ttoouli and E.J. McAdams
George Ttoouli is a PhD student researching ecopoetics. During earlier incarnations as a publisher, writer, freelance editor, university tutor and arts administrator, he was earning enough money to survive. He is now back to eating lentils and scrounging leftovers from corporate catering, while trying to find a publisher for his second collection of poetry. His publications include Static Exile (Penned in the Margins), the blog Diary of a Permaculturalist, and the Apple Anthology (Nine Arches Press).
E.J. McAdams is a poet and artist who lives with his wife and three children in Harlem, Ward's Island Sewershed, Manhattan, Lower Hudson Watershed, New York, USA, earth. This Fall, his mail art about Martha the last passenger pigeon was on display at the Phoenix Art Museum in Focus Latin America: Art Is Our Last Hope. His latest chapbook is TRANSECTs from Sona Books, and he was recently interviewed about the book by poet Phil Metres for The Conversant. McAdams has worked with architects and dancers to create unique walks in New York City and to establish innovative institutions like the interdisciplinary Laboratory of Art Nature and Dance (iLAND). He is a naturalist and has worked as an urban park ranger in New York City and as the executive director of NYC Audubon, where he partnered with the real estate sector to have skyscrapers turn off their lights during the fall and spring bird migrations.
Week 7 Thurs 19th Feb.
1:15 Steven Poole
Steven Poole (born in 1972) is a British author and journalist. He studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has subsequently written for publications including The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, and the New Statesman. He particularly concerns himself with the abuse of language and has written two books on the subject: Unspeak (2006) and Who Touched Base In My Thought Shower? (2013), which won a Plain English Award in 2014. His book Trigger Happy is an investigation of the aesthetics of videogames. He currently writes a regular column and reviews in the Guardian.
Week 8 Thurs 26th Feb.
1:15 Daniel Hahn and Chantal Wright
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with more than forty books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. Recent titles include Nowhere People, by Paulo Scott; Once Upon a Time in Rio, by Francisco Azevedo; Victus, by Albert Sanchez Piñol; and Family Heirlooms, by Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award. He is also a reviewer, and serves regularly on book prize judging panels (this year including the IMPAC Dublin Award); Hahn is current chair of the Society of Authors, and on the board of many other organisations that deal with literature and free expression. Hahn's next book will be a new edition of The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, published March 2015.
Chantal Wright is an award-winning literary and academic translator. In 2012 she was awarded the inaugural Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation for Tzveta Sofronieva's collection of poetry A Hand Full of Water, and she has been the recipient of an award from PEN American Center's translation fund. She translated from German and French into English, and is a beloved professor of literary translation to her students at the University of Warwick.
Week 9 Thurs 5th March
1:15 Tony Frazer and Kelvin Corcoran
Tony Frazer has been editing Shearsman and Shearsman Books since 1981. He also has edited the anthology A State of Independence (1998) for Stride Publications, and Roy Fisher's Interviews Though Time (Shearsman Books, 2000; 2nd edition 2013). Frazer was co-editor of the poetry selection in Chicago Review's special double issue New Writing in German (2002) and has been an occasional translator of contemporary German poets. Giramondo Publishing, Sydney, published a collection of Frazer's translations of Lutz Seiler in May 2005 as In the year one — Selected Poems.
Kelvin Corcoran is the author of twelve collections of poetry, the most recent of which is For the Greek Spring. In addition he has interviewed Lee Harwood for the volume Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood, published in June 2008. Three extended interviews with Corcoran can be found in The Writing Occurs As Song: A Kelvin Corcoran Reader, the first full-length study of his work, edited by Andy Brown and published by Shearsman in 2014. With Ian Davidson he is the editor of the Gratton Street Irregulars chapbook series. Recent projects include collaboration with Greek musicians in setting his poetry to music and collaborative performances with songwriters Jack Hues, Liam Magill and pianist Sam Bailey at the Free Range series of events in Canterbury.
Week 10 Thurs 12th March
1:15 Alicia Cohen
Alicia Cohen is the author of three books of poetry: bEAR (2000), Debts and Obligations (2009), and Coherer (forthcoming from Verge Books). Her opera and gallery installation Northwest Inhabitation Log (2004), was a noir drama set in the American Pacific Northwest and explored the "between" of genocide and ecological catastrophe. She helped found the Portland, Oregon arts space Pacific Switchboard and has taught at Reed College and Portland State University.
Autumn Term (2014)
Week 1 Thurs. 2nd Oct.
1.15 "Making It": a conversation on the writing life. Join Warwick Writing Programme staff David Vann, Sarah Moss, David Morley, Maureen Freely, Jonathan Skinner, and Tim Leach, for a discussion around the various meanings of "making it" as a writer, in today's changing literary, cultural, political, and economic climate.
Week 2 Thurs. 9th Oct.
1.15 A reading and discussion with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, the author of numerous acclaimed volumes of poetry, most recently Hello, the Roses (New Directions, 2013); I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2006); and Concordance (Kelsey St. Press, 2006), a collaboration with the sculptor Kiki Smith. Berssenbrugge's other collections include Nest (2003); The Four Year Old Girl (1998); Endocrinology (1997), a collaboration with Kiki Smith; Sphericity (1993); Empathy (1989); and The Heat Bird (1983).
Week 3 Thurs 16th Oct.
1:15 Josh Roche, literary associate and theatre director working at Soho Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe and Sonia Friedman Productions, discusses getting into the competitive, under-funded world of theatre. A graduate of English and Creative Writing at Warwick, Roche is the Writers' Centre Associate for Soho Theatre, scouting new talent, developing first scripts and offering notes, as well as reading unsolicited scripts for the theatre. He also is the Artistic Director of Fat Git Theatre, a company founded at Warwick University, dedicated to new writing and adaptation. Fat Git currently is on a residency with IATL to develop Gaia: a group of selected students will be commissioned each week (for five weeks) to respond to an issue of environmental science, and their work will be drafted through to performance.
Week 4 Thurs 23rd Oct.
1:15 Join Twisted Dark creator Neil Gibson for a discussion about the writing life in comics, how he moved from being a management consultant to writing a Kindle number 1 best seller. Neil explains what he does, how he does it and why. Learn the ins and outs of writing comics and running a comic business. Neil is the founder and lead writer at TPub.
Week 5 Thurs 30th Oct.
1.15 Eleni Sikélianòs, the great-grandaughter of the Nobel-nominated Greek poet Angelos Sikélianòs, received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from the Naropa Institute. Sikélianòs is the author of The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House Press, 2013), Body Clock (2008), The Book of Jon (City Lights Publishers, 2004), The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004), The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, 2003), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press, 2001), The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo Press, 1997), and To Speak While Dreaming (Selva Editions, 1993). Sikélianòs teaches in the Denver University Creative Writing Program;. In addition to reading her poetry, Sikélianòs will discuss DU's Creative Writing PhD, which Poets & Writers ranked the top Creative Writing PhD in the U.S.
Week 7 Thurs 13th Nov.
1:15 Joshua Corey with Stephen Vincent. Joshua Corey is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Barons (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), and a novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014). With G.C. Waldrep he co-edited The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He lives in Evanston, Illinois and is associate professor of English at Lake Forest College, where he is also a co-director of Lake Forest College Press / &NOW Books. A longtime resident of San Francisco, Stephen Vincent is a poet, artist, occasional essayist, maker of accordion fold artist books, and noted publisher. His poetry books include Walking and Walking Theory (Junction Books, 2007) and, most recently, After Language / Letters to Jack Spicer (BlazeVox, Publishers, 2011). He has exhibited work in one person shows at Quay-Braunstein and Steven Wolf Fine Arts in San Francisco and Jack Hanley in New York. In addition to private collections, his drawings and artist books are in the Berkeley Art Museum and Special Collections, Stanford University.
Week 8 Thurs 20th Nov.
1:15 David Vann will discuss the ins and outs of applying to creative writing programs, fellowships, and teaching jobs, in the US. Published in 20 languages, David Vann's internationally-bestselling books have won 15 prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain, and appeared on 75 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He has been featured in 60 international literary festivals and had book tours in 26 countries. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men's Health, Men's Journal, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, Elle UK, Esquire UK, Esquire Russia, National Geographic Adventure, Writer's Digest, McSweeney's, and other magazines and newspapers. A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L'Heureux fellow, he holds degrees from Stanford and Cornell and is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.
5:00 SPECIAL SESSION (in collaboration with the Warwick Arts Centre): A reading and conversation with poet Alec Finlay. Finlay will read from and discuss Global Oracle: a work of prophetic science, an apicultural model of global satellite communication and navigation systems. This multimedia artwork, commissioned by University of Warwick as a permanent installation, is one of Finlay's technological pastorals, in which 6 NAVSTAR satellites have been constructed as nests for solitary bees. Global Oracle explores the relationship between bee behaviour and navigation, prophecy in Ancient Greece, and GPS satellite navigation systems, such as our contemporary oracle, Garmin. The oracle at Delphi was sacred to bees, presided over by The Melissae, seers high on 'green' honey; our 'buzz' is the honey of star-fallen communication.
Week 9 Thurs 27th Nov.
1:15 Catherine Taylor with Stephen Cope. Catherine Taylor is the author of Apart (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), a mixed-genre memoir and political history that combines prose, poetry, cultural theory, and found texts and photography from South African archives. Her first book, Giving Birth: A Journey Into the World of Mothers and Midwives (Penguin Putnam, 2002), won the Lamaze International Birth Advocate Award. Taylor is a Founding Editor of Essay Press, which focuses on innovative book-length essays. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University and teaches at Ithaca College. She is the Co-Director, along with photographer Nicholas Muellner, of the Image-Text-Ithaca Workshop and Symposium (http://imagetextithaca.com). Stephen Cope is the editor of George Oppen: Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (U of CA, 2008) and has published articles on Oppen, Objectivism, and Modernism in Jacket, The Blackwell Companion to Modern Poetry, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the IP-Gertrude Stein Award in Contemporary Poetry, and poems of his have appeared widely in journals throughout the United States. Cope also is the founder and host of the radio program and podcast of international musics, Conference of the Birds, which provides the provocation and impetus for his ongoing, serial poetic project of the same name. With Catherine Taylor and Eula Biss, he is a founding editor of Essay Press. He currently lives in Ithaca, New York and teaches at Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges.
Week 10 Thurs 4th Dec.
1:15 Max Porter, Senior Editor at Granta Books
Summer Term (2014)
Week 1: Thursday April 24th
Information Sharing and Skills Swap
Come along to find out what your fellow writers might do for you, and what you might do for them. Need an editor? A designer? A promotions manager?
NOTE: This event includes cake.
Week 2: Thursday May 1st
David Morley
'Performing Your Work'
David Morley is a poet. This event will discuss why being a poet is just *the best* career move you could ever make as a writer. PLUS a guide to spoken word performance by a stammerer.
Week 3: Thursday May 8th
CHANGE OF VENUE AND TIME! Please go to the Rehearsal Room for 1-2pm LitBiz with George and Jack! Thanks!!
George Ttouli and Jack McGowan
'Starting Up and Keeping Going'
George Ttoouli has been at Warwick too long. He lives on a diet of lentils and verse. He will be talking about being old enough to pity new poetry start-ups when he hears about them and how he's managed to survive despite nutrient deficiency and near-total anonymity. Also: avocado; Heaventree; sleeping in offices; Nine Arches; Static Exile; Polarity; Silhouette; Fire & Dust; Horizon; London vs. Les Provinces.
Jack McGowan runs poetry slams.
Week 4: Thursday May 15th
Gwyneth Box
'Behind the screens: a nearly non-technical look at digital publishing'
As a writer, how much do you know about digital publishing? Can you tell an ebook from an app? Do you know why reader experience is different on a Kindle and an iPad? How digital magazines differ from on-line magazines? What lean-forward and lean-back technology are and how they affect digital content? Even for the non-technologically minded, none of these are difficult concepts. Understanding them could help you make more-informed decisions about publishing and being published.
Gwyneth's IT and teaching experience stretch back more than thirty years. In addition to her work as owner of Tantamount, a design studio and publishing consultancy specialising in digital publications, she is a poet, translator and writer.
Week 5: Thursday May 22nd
Jonathan Skinner
'Poetry and Authorship: a brief history of DIY publishing'
What does it mean to author poetry? When asked, "how do I get my work published?" I usually answer, "if you are interested in publication, publish poetry, be your own authority." In fact, the history of poets publishing poetry is contiguous with the history of poetry itself. For the purposes of this talk, I'll look back to the "mimeo revolution" of the 1960s and 70s (with glances further back at the role "little magazines" played in the careers of some great modernists), out at the networked reality of contemporary media, and sample some of today's best digital-analog "desktop" publishing ventures. Come learn why impactful authorship has to do with so much more than writing program journals, prizes, competitions, and nationally recognized presses. There will be show and tell and lots of beautiful little books to hold.
Jonathan Skinner is a poet, editor, critic, and educator. He founded and sporadically edits the journal ecopoetics www.ecopoetics.org
SPECIAL FOLLOW-UP EVENT: BOOKMAKING WORKSHOP AND READING! 27 MAY 2014, 2-5 pm in the WRITERS ROOM WORKSHOP 2-4:30 / READING 4:30-5
A free bookmaking workshop, open to students, staff and friends of the Warwick Writing Program. In the final half hour of the workshop, we will show off and celebrate our newly-minted chapbooks with a group reading. You are welcome to come just for the presentation of chapbooks and reading if you cannot attend the workshop.
For the workshop, please bring a laptop (if possible) and/or a digital file (on a memory stick), with your text (can be as little as one poem or short text, or as many as 36 pages of work, in any genre or mix of genres), and bring materials for a cover or container/ book structure of any kind. This is an excellent use of text from portfolios and final projects! (Also, if you can, bring some linen thread, available at most haberdashers, and a needle large enough for this thicker-than-usual thread.) We will cover the basics of chapbook design, layout and assemblage and also play with inventive book forms. It would be helpful if, before the workshop, participants could explore some of these online chapbook-making resources and guides:
LIMITED TO 12 PARTICIPANTS / RSVP to Jonathan Skinner to secure a place / email@example.com
Week 6: Thursday May 29th
Cathy Galvin
'How To Wing It'
Want to know how to write for newspapers? What fiction and non-fiction can teach each other? How to make the leap from writing to running your own publishing start-up? Do you really want to know how to wing it?
Cathy Galvin can offer a few answers. Her career has taken her from work experience as a 17 year-old trainee journalist at the Coventry Evening Telegraph to the MA in Writing at Warwick at a slightly older age. In between she has written for almost every national newspaper, from the Sun to the Financial Times, and worked on staff as a senior editor at the Sunday Times for over ten years. There, she founded the Sunday Times EFG short story award. Since leaving two years ago, she has established the Word Factory, an organisation promoting short fiction writers and their work - at intimate monthly salons, via masterclasses and online. She is currently associate editor of the relaunched magazine, Newsweek.
Week 7: Thursday June 5th
Leila Rasheed
'Writing for Children and Young Adults'
Leila Rasheed is the author of three books for ages 9 -12, published by Usborne, and several publisher-led novels for children and teenagers. She has an MA in Children's Literature and was previously children's bookseller for Waterstone's. She'll talk about the art and craft of writing for children and teenagers, plus she will let you into the secret of how she managed to make a living from writing for two whole years (men have killed for this knowledge). Please come prepared to do a little writing of your own.
Week 8: Thursday June 12th
Liz Baker
'So You Want To Be Your Own Boss?'
NOTE: This is a 2 hour session. Attendance should be confirmed by email to firstname.lastname@example.com.
This may be your last term at University and hopefully the MA in Writing and Litbiz sessions have left you wanting to nurture your creativity further. There can be little doubt that this will be a struggle financially. You may have to earn money in various ways and build a portfolio career to continue as a writer.
Our Litbiz session on 12th June is an introduction to the financial aspects of self employment as a creative writer or artist, exploring some of the jargon used and identifying the most important things to focus on. It will be an interactive session, using a case study to explore cash flows and business planning. For this reason it will be two hours, from 1pm to 3pm in the Writers room. Please bring a calculator. (But don't let that put you off - there will be no complicated maths.)
To assist planning, and minimise wasted photocopying, please email Liz Baker (firstname.lastname@example.com) to confirm attendance.
Liz Baker will be familiar to some of you as a student on the Warwick Creative Writing Course. But she is also a Chartered Accountant, who worked with Price Waterhouse (the accountancy firm) as a management consultant before moving to a career in financial services (Pensions not Banking!).
Week 9: Thursday June 19th
Unfortunately Naomi has had to cancel the scheduled programme for LitBiz this week HOWEVER, the MA in Writing students have recently published their MA Anthology entitled Tinderbox. The MA students and the Warwick Writing Programme warmly invite you to an impromptu and informal launch party for the anthology at the same time and place (1:30 Thursday 19th June in the Writer's Room). Please do come and feel free to bring your own bottle, nibbles, food, cake (!), etc to the event! You will be able to purchase the anthology for just £6 so bring some cash along with you (bring exact change please)!
Naomi Alsop - CANCELLED! Come party instead!! See above!
'Teaching Creative Writing and Writing in Schools'
In this interactive talk we will explore the relationship between the writing voice and the teaching voice, consider how writers can supplement their living by working in schools and the community, and look at how to develop opportunities to work.
Naomi Alsop is a writer working in school and community settings. She runs training throughout the country which is designed to support writers in develop their own creative teaching practice based on the ways they write. She teaches at the University of Warwick.
Week 10: Thursday June 26th
Stephanie Redding 'Career Fulfilment'
Stephanie is the link Senior Careers Consultant for English and Comparative Literary Studies and the Writing Programme at Warwick. She is also a certified Realise 2 Strengths Practitioner. Being aware of your strengths and those of others can make you more productive and happier in your work. After briefly sharing some of the theory around strengths and career happiness, Stephanie will facilitate a strengths identification activity and talk through approaches you can use to make the most of your strengths in your quest for career fulfilment whether you are planning for a career in writing, publishing or beyond.
Spring Term (2014)
Week 11 Thurs 9th Jan.
1:30 Malgorzata Kitowski
Malgorzata Kitowski graduated from Warwick with an MA in Literature in 2003. Alongside a career working in branding and marketing, Malgorzata has been running the PoetryFilm project since 2002. She has organised over 50 PoetryFilm events at venues such as Tate Britain, the ICA, and the South Bank Centre, and she has presented PoetryFilm talks at institutions such as the National Film and Television School, London Met University, and the Royal College of Art.
Malgorzata will talk about the routes she has taken creatively and professionally, read some poems and show some films.
Week 12 Thurs 16th Jan.
1:30 Leena Normington & Icon Books MD Philip Cotterell: Working in Publishing
A former MA student at Warwick, Leena now works as Digital Sales & Marketing Executive at Icon Books, an independent British publisher of popular, engaging and sometimes provocative non-fiction for adults, where she oversees all things digital.
Philip was formerly Deputy MD and minority shareholder at Piatkus Books 1982-2007. Over 25 years he built up a self financing commercial book publishing house from its beginnings in a suburban house in Outer London until selling to Little Brown, a division of Hachette, the country's leading publishing group. He has been Managing Director at Icon Books since 2012.
Leena and Philip will discuss the kind of titles they publish at Icon, the publishing process and how operations have altered since the introduction of digital media.
Week 13 Thurs 23rd Jan.
1:30 Jackie Wills
(In association with the Warwick Review) Award-winning English poet.
Week 14 Thurs 30th Jan.
1:30 Michael Hulse: a life in writing.
Hear Warwick Review editor Michael Hulse reading from his latest collection and join in a general discussion about the joys and pitfalls of a writing and editorial life. Michael Hulse's new poetry collection, Half-Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year by John Kinsella in the Australian Book Review.
Week 15 Thurs 6th Feb.
1.30 Susan Elkin
Education journalist and author of over 30 non-fiction books, Susan Elkin has been freelancing for newspapers, magazines and websites since 1990. She will discuss "The business of writing": freelancing for money, including online, promoting yourself and your wares, professional associations and networking.
Week 16 Thurs 13th Feb.
1:30 John Bond
Warwick graduate and former MD of Harper Collins UK, John now runs his own innovative publishing services provider, White Fox. John will share what he learned as MD of Harper Collins that you can apply to your own work and how to get published.
Week 17 Thurs 20th Feb.
1:30 Carrie Kania
An agent at Conville & Walsh and former publisher of Harper Perennial US, Carrie also is co-owner of the Soho-based independent bookshop, the Society Club. She will give us an insight into what agents really want.
Week 18 Thurs 27th Feb.
1:30 Tim Leach
Tim's first book The Last King of Lydia was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, he will be giving his personal take on how a graduate from the MAW got his book published.
Week 19 Thurs 6th March
1:30 Alison Moore
Alison's debut novel The Lighthouse was short-listed for the Man-Booker Prize in 2012 and her debut short story collection The Pre-War House and Other Stories was nominated for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2013. Alison will be sharing the lessons to be learned from a debut novel and collection.
Week 20 Thurs 13th March
1:30 Erin Kelly
Erin is an English graduate from the University of Warwick, whose fourth novel is being published in 2014. Her first novel The Poison Tree has been adapted for television. Her second novel The Sick Rose is set in Leamington and a lightly fictionalised Kenilworth. Erin will give us her take on the conflicts between genre/commercial fiction and literary fiction.
Autumn Term (2013)
Week 1: Thurs. 3rd Oct.
1.30 Introduction to LitBiz and the Anthology: Ian Sansom, Sarah Moss and Pete Waterhouse.
Week 2: Thurs. 10th Oct.
1.30 Philip Gwyn Jones (former Books Publisher, Granta Books)
Week 3: Thurs 17th Oct.
1:30 Apple Anthology launch
Week 4: Thurs 24th Oct.
1:30 David Vann
Week 5: Thurs 31st Oct.
1.30 Anne Meadows (Assistant editor, Granta Books)
Week 7: Thurs 14th Nov.
1:30 Alyson Hallett (poet) [canceled: Sarah Moss -- literaria autobiographia]
Week 8: Thurs 21st Nov.
1:30 Alyson Fielding [canceled: David Vann on US LitBiz -- fellowship opportunities, residencies, etc.]
Week 9: Thurs 28th Nov.
1:30 Amy Sackville (author of The Still Point and Orkney)
Week 10: Thurs 5th Dec.
1:30 James Treadwell (author of the Advent trilogy)