Martin Amis is regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction. His novels include Money: A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989) Time's Arrow (1991) and The House of Meetings (2006). His other work includes the James Tait Black Memorial Award winning volume of autobiography, Experience (2000) and the essay collection The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986) and The War Against Cliché (2001). His latest novel The Pregnant Widow (2010) examines the implications and after-effects of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and was launched at a special event at the Centre for New Writing on the 8th of February. A podcast recording of the event is available on this issue's Podcasts page. From 2007 to 2010 Martin Amis was Professor of Creative Writing at The University of Manchester.
Issue 4: In Conversation: The Pregnant Widow
Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, New South Wales and now lives in Sydney. In 2002, Indigo published a collection of his poems: Cut Lunch. He has also translated books of fiction by Latin American authors, including César Aira’s Ghosts (New Directions, 2009) and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, 2008).
Issue 4: Two Poems
Alan Drew was born and raised in Southern California and has travelled throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He taught English literature for three years at a private high school in Istanbul, arriving just four days before the devastating 1999 Marmara earthquake.
His first novel, Gardens of Water, set among the ruins of that quake, was published by Bloomsbury in 2009. In 2004 he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a teaching/writing fellowship.
Alan lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children, and teaches fiction writing at Villanova University. He is currently finishing his second novel.
Issue 4: Sudan
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
Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She was recently awarded Poetry magazine’s Editor’s Prize for a feature article for her essay Sing, God-Awful Muse about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Philadelphia.
Issue 4: Three Poems
MJ Hyland studied English and law at the University of Melbourne and worked as a lawyer for several years. How the Light Gets In, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and her second novel, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won both the Hawthornden and Encore Prizes. Her third novel, This is How (2009) received widespread critical acclaim, has been translated into seven languages, and is published in fifteen countries.
Issue 4: Interview with Roddy Doyle
Dore Kiesselbach won the 2009 Bridport Prize and has published widely in American magazines. He studied creative writing at Oberlin College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Minneapolis.
Issue 4: Two Poems
Brendan Mathews’s stories have appeared in a number of American literary magazines, including VQR, TriQuarterly, Epoch, and Cincinnati Review. Two stories were listed among the “100 Distinguished Stories” in Best American Short Stories 2008; another was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A member of the faculty in literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, he lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their four children.
Issue 4: Henry and His Brother
Born in County Waterford, Ireland, 1954 and Educated at University College Cork Thomas McCarthy has worked at Cork City Libraries since 1978. In 1994/95 he was Visiting Humphrey Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota. His first collection, The First Convention, was published by the Dolmen Press, Dublin in 1978. Since 1981 he has published The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Non-Aligned Storyteller(1984), Seven Winters in Paris (1989), The Lost Province (1996), Mr Dineen's Careful Parade (1999), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009), all with Anvil Press Poetry, London. In addition he has published two novels and a memoir. 1977 saw him win the Patrick Kavanagh Award for the manuscript of The First Convention. He has also been the recipient of The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, The O' Shaughnessy Poetry Prize (University of St. Thomas) and The Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He is a former editor of the Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review.
Issue 4: Four Poems
Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia of Belgian and Newcastle Irish parents. His books of poetry include The Canals of Mars (2004) and Jilted City (2010), and a translation of Mallarmé's For Anatole's Tomb.
He teaches French at Oxford university and lives in Caernarfon, North Wales.
His novel, The Last Hundred Days, about the last months of the Ceasuescu regime in Romania, appears in Spring next year.
Issue 4: from Blue Guide
Craig Raine is a poet and critic who is the founding editor of the literary tri-quarterly Areté. He has written two novels, Heartbreak and The Divine Comedy, both of which will be published by Atlantic Books - with the former being released in July 2010. His new book of poems, How Snow Falls, will appear in September 2010 and a new collection of essays, More Dynamite, in Spring 2011.
Issue 4: A Passion for Gardening
Kamila Rymajdo was born in 1985 in Warsaw, but has spent most of her life in Britain. She graduated from the Centre for New Writing in 2008 and is currently writing her first novel. She lives and works in Manchester.
Issue 4: American Cigarettes
Chris Smith graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester in 2008, moved to a mountain hut in France to work on his novel, and is currently living in South Carolina where he is focusing on a collection of short stories. Chris was a finalist in the 2009 Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. In addition he has been published in Tindal Street Press’ Roads Ahead (ed.Catherine O’Flynn) and Litro, links to which follow;
Tindal Street Press
Litro
Issue 4: Quasimodo