Jenn Ashworth is a graduate of the Manchester Centre for New Writing. Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy is out with Arcadia. She lives in Preston and splits her time between writing, freelance teaching and literature development. Her blog is here and she's currently working on her second novel: Cold Light. 'Same Old' is an extract from this novel.
Issue 3: Same Old
Jenny Bornholdt is a poet and anthologist. Her poetry has been praised for its freshness and concealed depths. The author of numerous collections, Bornholdt was the winner of the 2002 Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and received the 2003 Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award. In 2005, she became the fifth Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate. Bornholdt is married to poet Gregory O’Brien, with whom she has edited several anthologies.
Issue 3: Confessional
Averill Curdy lives in Chicago. Her poems have appeared in many American journals, including Poetry. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois State Arts Council, as well as a Pushcart Prize.
Issue 3: Four Poems
Alan Gillis was born in Belfast and lives in Scotland, where he is Lecturer in English at The University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s, published by Oxford University Press in 2005. His debut poetry collection, Somebody, Somewhere (Gallery), won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His second collection Hawks and Doves (Gallery) was a PBS Recommendation in summer 2007, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Issue 3: Two Poems
David Gledhill is an artist and lecturer living and working in Manchester. His paintings are adapted from his own photographic source material together with found images, television and cinema. They represent an attempt to locate a shared experience of the built environment as a determining factor in our sense of community and history. He has exhibited widely both in this country and abroad and is represented by Philips Art Gallery, Manchester.
Issue 3: Two Paintings
Rodney Jones’s most recent poetry book, Salvation Blues, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His seven other books include Elegy for The Southern Drawl, a finalist for the Pulitzer, and Transparent Gestures, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Issue 3: Four Fables Set in The Shawnee Hills
Ian McGuire’s first novel Incredible Bodies was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. This is the first chapter of his second novel Spontaneous You. He has taught at the University of Manchester since 1996 and is currently Co-Director of the university’s Centre for New Writing.
Issue 3: Extract from Spontaneous You
Vivek Narayanan’s first book of poems was Universal Beach (Mumbai: Harbour Line, 2006). More of his work can be found online on sites like Agni, Blackbox Manifold, Chimurenga, Pratilipi and Almost Island (where he also plays the role of Consulting Editor), and offline in recent anthologies like Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton), and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry.
Issue 3: Two Poems
John Redmond grew up in Dublin and, after stints in Oxford and Minnesota, has been a lecturer at the University of Liverpool since 2003. He has written three books, two collections of poetry (Thumb’s Width and MUDe) and a Creative Writing treatise (How to Write a Poem). Associated for some time with the long-running magazine, Thumbscrew, he has reviewed poetry for many journals including the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian. He is currently writing a critical book for Seren called Poetry and Privacy.
Issue 3: Four Poems
Geoff Ryman is the author of several successful novels, mostly science fiction. The Unconquered Country (1984) won both the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award and the World Fantasy Award. The Child Garden (1989) won the Arthur C Clarke Award and the John W Campbell Memorial Award (First Place). An extract published in Interzone also won a BSFA Award. Geoff recently edited When it Changed, an experiment between leading scientists and literary authors to create a brand new strain of the SF bug; one that extends the scientific repertoire of the genre beyond the commonplaces of space-travel, time-travel or AI.
Issue 3: Writers Talk with China Miéville
Issue 6: The Storyteller
Issue 8: Final Frontiers?
Peter Sansom has been company poet with M&S and the Prudential, and he currently is writing poems for Morrisons. Formerly Fellow in Poetry at both Leeds and Manchester Universities, he is a director of The Poetry Business and editor of The North and Smith/Doorstop Books. Peter’s publications include The Night is Young (Rialto Press, 2009) and Selected Poems (Carcanet 2010).
Issue 3: Four Poems
Tim Scott graduated with a distinction from the Centre for New Writing last year. ‘Rustle’ is taken from his short story collection Sudden Scripture, which he started writing here. Other stories from this collection have been published in Wufniks magazine and online at Rainy City Stories.
Issue 3: Rustle
Rachel Seiffert was born in 1971. She is the author of the Booker-shortlisted The Dark Room and an acclaimed collection of short stories, Field Study. In 2003, she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, and her last novel, Afterwards, was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2007. The extract published is a chapter from her new novel, which set in Glasgow, and taking longer than she thought to finish.
Issue 3: Extract From A Novel-in-Progress
David Wheatley is the author of three collections of poetry from Gallery Press: Thirst, Misery Hill and Mocker. A fourth is due soon. He has edited the Poems of James Clarence Mangan for Gallery and Samuel Beckett's Selected Poems 1930-1989 for Faber and Faber, and keeps a blog at http://georgiasam.blogspot.com
Issue 3: Three Poems
Issue 8: The Novelist