Volume 07, Chapter 03 | January 2020

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Image by Charles Dana Gibson / British Library

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2020. We made it! Today is simultaneously the end of an era and a new beginning and it feels like the perfect time to reflect on some of the amazing achievements of Visual Verse and of our writer community.

Visual Verse, first published in November 2013, is now in its seventh volume. We have published over 6700 pieces of original writing in 75 monthly issues. We have featured established writers like Ali Smith, Niven Govinden and Chika Unigwe; exciting contemporary voices including Amrou Al-Khadi, Irenosen Okojie, Paul Ewen, Eley Williams, Carmen Marcus and Enda Walsh and up-and-coming writers like Nisha Ramayya, Elieen McNulty Holmes, Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Sarvat Hasin whose work deserves to be read. We have also featured writers like Rishi Dastidar, Susanna Crossman and Angela Young, who are among a stable of Visual Verse contributors consistently producing work we hugely admire. Alongside our leads we have published you: more than 2500 individual writers from every corner of the globe. Thanks to you, Visual Verse is truly a living, breathing literary organism.

We are equally proud of our curatorial record, with 75 carefully selected image prompts from individual artists like Daniel Frost, Penny Byrne, Marc Schlossman, Hernan Bas and Hannah Coulson; world-class galleries and organisations like NASA, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Bodleian Libraries and M Leuven and partners like Creative Review who published a selection of Visual Verse writers in print. Visual Verse continues to thrive thanks to the energy, creativity and generosity of our writers, readers, artists and partners. Thank you all for an incredible few years.

So let’s begin the year with a visual prompt so bold that it sets the tone for owning 2020. The image is by Charles Dana Gibson courtesy of the British Library archive.

To inspire you even more, we have three powerful lead writers all breaking new ground with their cross-genre work. We are inordinately proud and excited to start the year with a piece by Mary Jean Chan (http://www.maryjeanchan.com/) , a London-based poet, editor and critic from Hong Kong. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and current guest co-editor of The Poetry Review for Spring 2020. In 2019, Mary Jean was named as one of Jackie Kay’s 10 Best BAME writers in the UK as a part of the British Council’s and the National Centre for Writing’s International Literature Showcase. She came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2019 and won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2018. Her debut collection, Flèche, is published by Faber & Faber and is currently shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award. Fingers crossed she wins!

On page two, it’s an honour to publish Noo Saro-Wiwa (https://www.noosarowiwa.com) who was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England. Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria was named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012, and selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It has been translated into French and Italian, and in 2016 it won the Albatros Literature Prize in Italy. Noo has also written book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Prospect magazine, New York Times and City AM, among others.

And, we gave our final page to a writer we have published regularly over our 6 years and three months in the game! With only 48 hours notice, our page 3 lead is by Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, Susanna Crossman (https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/) . She is the winner of the 2019 LoveReading Very Short Story Award and has recent/upcoming work in Neue Rundschau, (2019) S. Fischer (translated into German) alongside John Berger and Anne Carson, We’ll Never Have Paris, Repeater Books (2019), Trauma, Dodo Ink (2020), Berfrois, The Creative Review, 3:AM Journal, The Lonely Crowd, Litro and more… She was nominated for Best of The Net (2018) for her non-fiction essays, her fiction has been short-listed for awards such as the Bristol Prize and Glimmertrain. Susanna just completed her debut novel, Dark Island and is represented by Craig Literary, NY. When she’s not writing, she works internationally as a clinical arts-therapist and lecturer.

What more could you ask for? Now that the holiday season is coming to an end, it’s time to sharpen your pencils, dear writers… The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year!

Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

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Volume 06, Chapter 03 | January 2019

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Image by Matt Boyce

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2019! Yesterday, we launched our January issue in the quiet aftermath of new year celebrations. Your visual inspiration is an image by comic artist and illustrator Matt Boyce (http://mattboyce.com/mattboyce/) that fits the general ambience of the moment, at least for us. This is the first time we have featured an image with any kind of words incorporated and we are excited to see what you come up with.

We are delighted to welcome The Whole Kahani (http://www.thewholekahani.com/) , a group of female voices from South Asia (who are all now based in the UK) to our lead slots. Their new collection, May We Borrow Your Country, with an introduction by our editor, Preti Taneja, will be published by Linen Press and launched at Waterstones Gower Street on January 26th, 2019. Before you come along to that, we bring you a taster of their work…

Leading us into the new year is Kavita A. Jindal, co-founder of The Whole Kahani and author of the poetry collection Raincheck Renewed (Chameleon Press). The manuscript for her debut novel won the Brighthorse Novel Prize 2018. Kavita’s short stories, poems and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals in the UK and around the world and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Zee TV and European radio stations. She serves as Senior Editor at Asia Literary Review.

Our second lead is Reshma Ruia, a co-founder of The Whole Kahani, and fiction editor at Jaggery Lit Magazine. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup, was described in The Sunday Times as “a gem of straight faced comedy”. Her second novel, A Mouthful of Silence was shortlisted for the 2014 SI Leeds literary prize. Reshma’s poetry and short stories have appeared in various British and international journals and anthologies as well as broadcast on Radio 4. Born in India but brought up in Italy and now living in Manchester, her writing reflects the preoccupations of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging.

Mona Dash is the author of Untamed Heart (Tara India Research Press 2016), and two collections of poetry, Dawn-Drops (Writer’s Workshop 2001) and A certain way (Skylark Publications 2017). She has a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the London Metropolitan University. Her short story collection ‘Let us look elsewhere’ was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2018. Her memoir, A Roll of The Dice: a story of love, loss and genetics will be published by Linen Press in 2019. Originally from India, she lives in London.

Radhika Kapur’s work as a writer/Creative Director in advertising has won awards at Cannes, One Show, Asia Pacific Adfest and Clio; she also writes short fiction and scripts. Her writing has appeared in the Feminist Review, Poem International and The Pioneer. She won third place in the Euroscript Screenwriting Competition (2015) and was longlisted for BBC Script Room (2017) and the London Short Story Prize (2016). She has recently completed an MA in Screenwriting from Birkbeck, University of London.

Born in Bombay, Shibani Lal moved to the UK in 2000. She was runner-up in the Asian Writer prize and was recently longlisted for the Bristol Prize and Cambridge Short-Story Prize. Shibani has worked in the City for over a decade; she’s also an open-water swimmer and recently swam across the Bosphorous from Asia to Europe.

Deblina Chakrabarty is a freelance writer from Bombay who relocated to London seven years ago. She’s written for various publications including the Times of India and DNA and is primarily interested in the chasm between genders, cultures, cities and lovers that form open terrain for curious examination. By day she flirts on the fringes of storytelling by working for international distribution at a major Hollywood studio.

Nadia Kabir Barb is the author of the short story collection, Truth or Dare. Her work has been published in Wasafiri, The Missing Slate, Open Road Review and Six Seasons Review, and she was the winner of the Audio Arcadia short story competition. She has worked in the health and development sector in both Bangladesh and the UK.

So with a new year and all the uncertainty it brings, you can be sure of one thing – Visual Verse will keep supporting new voices, celebrating successes, and inspiring you with avant-garde art. And, thanks to our Twitter habit, we will continue to bring your submissions into conversation with each others’ across the world.

The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Happy New Year.

Kristen, Preti and Lucie
with Editorial Assistants Luke and Rithika