Ralph Black’s poems have appeared in West Branch, the Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, Poetry Ireland Review and other journals. He is the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review.
His first book, Turning Over the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions. He teaches at SUNY Brockport, in Upstate New York, where he is Co-Director of the Brockport Writers Forum.
Issue 5: Three poems
Trevor Byrne was born in Dublin in 1981. He attended Trinity College and the University of Glamorgan. His first novel, Ghosts & Lightning, was published by Canongate in 2009.
Issue 5: Nothing at the Top
C.J. ('Jonty') Driver was born in 1939 in South Africa. He came to England in 1964 after a short spell in police detention and, after five years of being stateless, became a British citizen - and a prohibited immigrant in South Africa until the official end of apartheid. His first four novels (Elegy for a Revolutionary, Send War in our Time, O Lord, Death of Fathers and A Messiah of the Last Days) have recently been re-issued by Faber Finds.
For many years a teacher and headmaster in various schools, C.J. Driver has published another novel, a biography, and six books of poems, the latest So Far, Selected Poems 1960-2004. He is now a full-time writer living in East Sussex but travelling regularly in Europe, the Americas and Africa.
Issue 5: Two poems
Photo: Ellen Elmendorp
Leontia Flynn was born in County Down in 1974. She completed an MA in Edinburgh, before completing a PhD on the poetry of Medbh McGuckian at Queen’s University in Belfast.
In 2001 she won an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, These Days (2004), won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection of the Year) in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In the same year, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’ poets.
She currently works as a Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University. Her second poetry collection is Drives (Cape).
Issue 4: Profit and Loss
Issue 5: Catullus
Kerry Hardie was born in 1951 and grew up in County Down. She now lives in County Kilkenny with her husband, the writer Seán Hardie. Her poems have won many prizes. The Gallery Press has published A Furious Place (1996), Cry for the Hot Belly (2000), The Sky Didn't Fall (2003), The Silence Came Close (2006) and Only This Room (2009).
Her first novel, Hannie Bennet's Winter Marriage appeared in 2000; another, The Bird Woman was published in 2006. Kerry is a member of Aosdána.
Issue 5: Three poems
Photo: Paddy Jolley/The Gallery Press
Matthew Hull was born in Liverpool in 1987. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He is a staff writer at online arts magazine Creative Tourist, editorial assistant for web-based culture monthly Blankpages and was co-editor of Bewilderbliss, a journal of new prose and poetry from Manchester and beyond. He is currently working on short fiction.
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Born in Australia, DBC Pierre spent a lavish upbringing in Mexico learning the tools of his undoing. He undid himself on three continents during his twenties, spending his thirties in London and the West Indies. Having plied a piecemeal trade since childhood as a designer, photographer, film-maker and cartoonist, his first novel, Vernon God Little, erupted just before his 40th birthday. It went on to win the MAN Booker Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award for Comic Writing in 2003. His second novel, Ludmila's Broken English was published in 2006. He lives in County Leitrim, Ireland.
Issue 5: Interview with DBC Pierre
Jim Quinn is the author of four books on language, food and politics. His short stories have been published in Western Humanities Review and Other Voices. He lives in Philadelphia with his daughter Maisie and poet Daisy Fried to whom he is married.
Issue 5: Men in Love
James Robison has published in The New Yorker, won a Whiting Grant for his short fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his first novel, The Illustrator, brought out by Bloomsbury in the U.K. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and Grand Street. He co-wrote the 2008 film, New Orleans Mon Amour and has poetry and prose forthcoming or published in Story Quarterly,The Northwest Review, The Dublin Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, The Raleigh Review and elsewhere. He taught for eight years at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, was Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly and 2011 Visiting Artist at The University of Southern Mississippi.
Issue 5: Radio Talkers
Issue 8: LSD
For many years John Saul was the translator for Greenpeace in Germany. Before that he taught English as a second language in London. His short fiction has appeared throughout the UK (London Magazine, New Writing, anthologies published by Serpent's Tail) and elsewhere, most notably in Australia and Canada. It has been collected in three books by Salt Publishing in their modern fiction series.
His first collection, Call It Tender, was well received in The Times. A second, The Most Serene Republic: Love Stories from Cities, came out in 2008, and the third, As Rivers Flow, in July 2009. After many years in Germany, France, Canada and Ecuador he now lives in Suffolk.
Issue 5: Names
Norm Sibum has been writing and publishing poetry for over 40 years. Born in Oberammergau in 1947, he grew up in Germany, Alaska, Utah and Washington. He moved to Vancouver in 1968, and has lived in Montreal since 1994.
Sibum has published several volumes of poetry in Canada and England, most recently Smoke and Lilacs with Carcanet Press, Manchester (2009). In 2002 he received the A.M. Klein Award for Girls and Handsome Dogs, (Porcupine's Quill). He has also written a novel and several plays.
Issue 5: from Sub Divo
Peter Sirr lives in Dublin where he works as a freelance writer and translator. His most recent collection of poems is The Thing Is, published by Gallery Press in 2009. The Gallery Press has also published Marginal Zones (1984), Talk, Talk (1987), Ways of Falling (1991), The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange (1995), Bring Everything (2000), Selected Poems and Nonetheless (both 2004). He is a member of Aosdána.
Issue 5: Continual Visit
David Wagoner has published 18 books of poems - most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois Press, 2008) - and 10 novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991 and has won six yearly prizes from Poetry (Chicago), was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and twice for the National Book Award.
He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to its end in 2002.
Issue 5: Three poems
Laura Webb was born in Birkenhead in 1985. She graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester in 2008 and is currently working towards a PhD at the University of Sheffield on the poetry of Ted Hughes. Amongst other places, she has had poems recently published or forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma and the New Welsh Review.
Issue 5: Four Poems
J.T. Welsch grew up in a small farm town near St. Louis, Missouri but lives in Manchester, where he recently completed a PhD at The University of Manchester. His previous degrees are from Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and in screenwriting and poetry, both from Royal Holloway, University of London.
His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbox Manifold, The Red Wheelbarrow, Stand, The Boston Review and the Bedford Square anthology; and his dramatic writing has been performed or produced at the London Film School, Martin Harris Centre and Manchester's Library Theatre. A chapbook, Orchids, will be published by Salt in December.
Issue 5: Four Poems
C.K. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1936, and lives in Normandy, France. He has published 10 books in Britain with Bloodaxe, four of which were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Repair was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, and he has been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry 1998, a Guggenheim Fellowship and prizes from PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Misgivings, was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award.
He teaches in the Creative Writing Programme at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is currently a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. His latest collection, Wait, and his book on Walt Whitman, On Whitman, are both published in 2010.
Issue 5: Writers Writing Dying