Warwick Thursday Archive
2020-2021 Academic Year
Term 1:
Week 2: Caroline Lea (Audio Link, click here)
Caroline Lea grew up in Jersey and gained a First in English Literature and Creative Writing from Warwick University, where she now teaches writing. Her fiction and poetry have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and The Glass Woman was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown.
Week 3: Lucy Brydon (Audio Link, click here)
From Edinburgh, Lucy graduated from the University of Warwick with a BA in Creative Writing in 2005 before moving to Shanghai. She lived there until 2010, writing, directing, and producing short films, commercials and television dramas as well as learning Mandarin.
She then studied Film Directing at Columbia University’s MFA Programme in New York. Her short films have screened at numerous international festivals and her debut novel, Shanghai Passenger, was published by Blue Mark Books in 2015.
Lucy currently leads the Screenwriting course on the University of Warwick’s Creative Writing Programme, blogs for Little White Lies about filmmaking and is in active development on a number of feature and television projects. Lucy’s debut feature film BODY OF WATER was commissioned by Film London for their Microwave programme with support from BBC Films and the BFI, and stars Sian Brooke and Amanda Burton. It will premiere at Glasgow Film Festival 2020.
Week 4: Tim Leach: (Audio Link, click here)
Tim Leach is a writer of historical fiction, specialising in the ancient world, unreliable source texts, and the crossover points between myth and history. His first novel, The Last King of Lydia, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2013. A sequel, The King and the Slave, followed in 2014, and his latest book Smile of the Wolf, was published in Summer 2018.
Tim is a graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, where he now teaches fiction as an Assistant Professor. Originally from Essex, he now lives in Sheffield, and is a keen fell runner and rock climber in his spare time.
Week 7 - Women in Translation (Audio link, click here)
Meet two of the literary translators shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, Natascha Bruce (Lake Like a Mirror, by Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fong) and Nicky Harman (White Horse, by Chinese writer Yan Ge). Natascha and Nicky will be reading from their translations, and talking to current Warwick postgraduate students Yaqi Xi and Chunyan Jia.
You can read more about Lake Like a Mirror and White Horse here:
https://granta.com/products/lake-like-a-mirror/
https://www.hoperoadpublishing.com/white-horse
Week 9 - Michael Hulse (Audio link, click here)
Described by Gwyneth Lewis as “a formidable poet”, Michael Hulse has won numerous awards for his poetry, and has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by W. G. Sebald, Goethe and Rilke. Reading tours have taken him to Canada, the US and Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, India, and several European countries – his audience for his solo event at Adelaide Writers’ Week 2012 numbered 700. His co-edited anthology The Twentieth Century in Poetry was a poetry bestseller, and his most recent collection of poems, Half-Life, was chosen as a Book of the Year by John Kinsella. He co-founded the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine with Professor Donald Singer in 2009. Michael has worked in publishing, television and universities, and is now retiring from Warwick, where he has taught poetry and comparative literature for eighteen years. In this event to mark his retirement, Michael will read from his poetry and translations and will spare us his wit and wisdom.
Week 10 - Raymon Antrobus (Audio link, click here)
Raymond Antrobus FRSL was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of 'Shapes & Disfigurements' (Burning Eye, 2012) 'To Sweeten Bitter' (Out-Spoken Press, 2017), 'The Perseverance' (Penned In The Margins, 2018) and ‘All The Names Given’ (Picador, 2021)
In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre.
Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year award & The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded 'The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize', (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem 'Sound Machine'. Also in 2019, his poem ‘Jamaican British’ was added to the GCSE syllabus.
He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works 3, Jerwood Compton and the Royal Society of Literature. He is also one of the world's first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths University.
Raymond is a founding member of 'Chill Pill' and 'Keats House Poets Forum' and is an Ambassador for 'The Poetry School'.
His poems have been published in POETRY, Poetry Review, News Statesman, The Deaf Poets Society, as well as in anthologies from Bloodaxe, Peepal Tree Press and Nine Arches.
Raymond has read and performed his poetry at festivals (Glastonbury, Latitude, BOCAS etc) to universities (Oxford, Goldsmiths, Warick etc). He has won numerous Slams (Farrago International Slam Champion 2010, The Canterbury Slam 2013 and was joint winner at the Open Calabash Slam in 2016).
His poetry has appeared on BBC 2, BBC Radio 4, The Big Issue, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Guardian and at TedxEastEnd.
Raymond also writes for young readers. His debut children’s picture book ‘Can Bears Ski?’ is illustrated by Polly Dunbar and is published in the UK by Walker Books and in the US/Canada by Candle Wick Press.
http://www.raymondantrobus.com/
TERM 2
Week 3 - Zhanhei Wang and translator Christopher MacDonald talk about the Comma Press anthology The Book of Shanghai in conversation with Warwick postgraduates. (Audio link, click here)
Week 4 - Sam Jordison from Galley Beggar Press (Audio link, click here)
GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS is an independent publisher committed to publishing daring, innovative fiction and narrative non-fiction.
Founded in 2012, we are particularly keen to support writers of great literary talent writing outside the norm, who push the boundaries of form and language. Over the past six years, our authors – from Lucy Ellmann (Ducks, Newburyport), Preti Taneja (We that are young), to Eimear McBride (A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing), Alex Pheby (Lucia), and beyond – have gone on to be longlisted, shortlisted, and the winners of over twenty of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Wellcome Book Prize, The Goldsmiths Prize, The Desmond Elliott Prize, The Jan Michalski Prize, The Folio Prize, The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize.
We have been called a “small-but-mighty institution” (The Desmond Elliott Prize), a “tiny publisher… with a cartload of guts” (The Guardian), and “revolutionary” (The Telegraph).
GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS is run by its co-founders, Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar.
Week 7 - Stephen Aryan (Audio link, click here)
Stephen Aryan was born in 1977 and raised in Whitley Bay, England. He has been reading fantasy since a very young age. It started with books by David Eddings, Tolkien, C.S Lewis, Terry Brooks, Ursula le Guin, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and later David Gemmell, who had a huge influence on his work.
After graduating university in 1999 he started working in marketing. Around this time he also started submitting his first fantasy novel to agents.
In 2013, he submitted his latest novel, Battlemage, to Juliet Mushens. It took Stephen a long time and many struggles to get this far. You can read the full story on a two part blog he wrote called How I Found an Agent Part 1, and How I Found an Agent Part 2.
In 2014, Battlemage, was snatched up by Orbit books and subsequently published in 2015. It went on to be published in France, Germany and Russia and was a finalist for the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for best debut fantasy novel. Battlemage went on to win the inaugural Hellfest Inferno Award in France after a public vote. The sequels, Bloodmage, and Chaosmage were both published in 2016, completing the Age of Darkness trilogy.
In 2017 he published Mageborn, the first in a new trilogy, the Age of Dread, with Orbit books. This followed on from his first trilogy, with the return of fan-favourite characters and many new faces. The sequels, Magefall and Magebane were published in 2018 and 2019 respectively, wrapping up his second trilogy.
In 2018 he also published Of Gods and Men with Orbit, a digital and audio novella which served as a prequel to Battlemage.
In 2020 Stephen was picked up for a new duology by Angry Robot Books. Set in a brand new world, the first novel, The Coward will be published in mid-2021 with the sequel following in mid-2022.
TERM 3
Week 2 - Christopher Payne (Audio link, click here)
He will be talking about his translation of Li Juan's Distant Sunflower Fields (Sinoist Press, 2021)
Christopher Payne has co-translated award-winning novels such as Decoded and In the Dark by Mai Jia, as well as Jiang Zilong’s magnum opus, Empires of Dust, translated in collaboration with Olivia Milburn. Christopher holds a PhD in Chinese literature from SOAS at the University of London, and he has been teaching for over a decade. In 2020 he took up a position at the University of Toronto, where he has continued to champion Chinese literature in the English-speaking world.
Week 4 - Charlotte Salter (Audio link, click here)
Charlotte graduated from Warwick with a BA in Literature and Writing in 2012, and an MA in Writing in 2015. She is the author of two horror-adventure novels for young people, The Bone Snatcher and Where the Woods End. Charlotte now lives in London, where she works as a copywriter while working on her next project in YA fantasy.
Week 10 - Yvonne Maxwell (Audio link, click here)
Yvonne is the founder of the Thame Arts and Literature Festival, an inclusive, community-driven festival situated in the picturesque market town of Thame. Yvonne founded the festival in 2010. A History graduate from Queen Mary London University, Yvonne first worked for Pathe News and TNS, until she went on to work with Oxford Literary Festival as the volunteer steward manager, and decided to start up her own arts and literature festival in Thame.