Adam Lowe's debut collection Patterflash was picked as The Poetry Book Society's Book of the Week.
The book also hit #6, #7 and #13 in the Gay Drama, Gay Poetry and LGBTQ+ Critical Theory categories on Amazon UK.
Poet Adam Lowe was recently invited to speak to BBC Radio 4's programme The Digital Human. Asked about how language use is changing online to avoid filters and please advertisers, Adam speaks about how minority groups tend to suffer the most from such policing. But he also speaks about how language has always been able to mask and reveal.
Listen to the show, or download it, now on the BBC Radio 4 website.
Founding editor Jeremy Poynting is off to Jamaica as an invitee of the Calabash Festival at Treasure Beach. He’s scheduled to be taking part in a conversation, a “Reasoning” session with the great LKJ (whose new book Time Come: Selected Prose) Jeremy is currently reading with great pleasure) and with his long-time friend and our associate poetry editor, Kwame Dawes, whose new collection of poetry, Sturge Town, is due out in October, and then next year by the major US poetry publisher Norton.
Introduction made at the launch at the Bocas Litfest on Sunday 30th April. by Jeremy Poynting
(A note: this presentation was given to a predominantly Trinidadian audience, hence its mostly Trinidadian points of reference and the fact the festival was celebrating the 100th anniversary of Samuel Selvon's birth. The diaries, of course, cover writers from all over the Anglophone Caribbean. It is also a personal piece and does not represent Peepal Tree's public views on the monarchy.)
Starts on Tue, 25 Apr 2023, 7pm BST (Online; free)
Thirty years ago this month, Black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs in South East London. It became an international cause célèbre after Nelson Mandela was introduced to Stephen's parents by Anti-Racist Alliance founder Marc Wadsworth. The government set up the Macpherson public inquiry into the killing that found police to be riddled with institutional racism and it proposed unprecedented reform of the Met. Have lessons been learned, and what's the way forward?
We are pleased to announce that Ira Mathur has won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-fiction, on an all-Trinbagonian honours list including Anthony Joseph and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo.
Ira's memoir Love the Dark Days scooped the prize for non-fiction, while Anthony Joseph won the poetry prize for Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury) and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo won the fiction prize for When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton/Doubleday).
Marcia Douglas has been named as one of 10 writers to win one of this year's $50,000 Whiting Awards. Marcia Douglas's latest novel is The Marvellous Equations of the Dread.
Guest blog by Rachel Toye
T&T Newsday has written about the tributes made to Jennifer Rahim. The article includes a number of moving quotes from Jennifer's friends, students and colleagues.
