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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@crossmansusanna (https://twitter.com/crossmansusanna)

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Volume 07, Chapter 1 | November 2019

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Image by RUDE London.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

VISUAL VERSE IS SIX!

Yes we have made it through our teething and toddler years and now we are in big school. Our labour of love project has reached the grand old age of SIX and we are proud, humble, grateful and downright amazed. We couldn’t have made it without all our readers, writers, leads, supporters and some very special guest curators who took over and brought new voices to us.

THANK YOU!

And we must also thank our amazing team, based in the UK, Germany, USA, and sometimes Australia, who work around babies, books, dogs, higher education courses, day jobs and night jobs to bring the site to you each month and publish and tweet your work. We are proud to be a free resource for writers and readers all over the world.

For our sixth birthday edition, we’re bringing you a piece of graphic art by the tenacious, insanely talented duo that is RUDE London (https://www.thisisrude.com/) . Their work is big and loud and bold, setting the tone for this auspicious birthday issue. In response, we open with a line-up of some of the most exciting, avant-garde writers working today – all equally brilliant, equally unique.

Our page one piece comes from Chika Unigwe (https://twitter.com/chikaunigwe) , a Nigerian writer whose work is trend breaking. Her novels include Night Dancer and On Black Sisters Streets. She has written about climate change for the Guardian, feminism for the White Review and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in African writing. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, Better Never Than Late (https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/cassava-shorts/?v=3a52f3c22ed6) , out now from Cassava Republic.

Our second page is live from Linda Mannheim (https://www.lindamannheim.com/) , the author of three books of fiction: Risk, Above Sugar Hill and This Way to Departures, just out from Influx Press. Her work has appeared in magazines in the US, UK, South Africa, and Canada including Granta, 3:AM Magazine and Catapult Story. Eimear McBride said that Linda’s stories ‘provoke and abide like a slap’. Originally from New York, Linda divides her time between London and Berlin and is working on Barbed Wire Fever, a literary project that explores what it means to seek and provide refuge.

On page three, we bring you work from Glen James Brown (https://twitter.com/glen_j_brown?lang=en) , whose debut novel Ironopolis (https://www.parthianbooks.com/products/ironopolis) – about the collapse of industry and social housing in Teesside, and its impact on community, culture and folklore – was called ‘nothing short of a triumph’ by the Guardian. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for political fiction, as well as longlisted for the Portico Prize. He comes from County Durham, but lives and writes in sunny Manchester.

And to really jump off the deep end, we complete our launch with a piece by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (https://yararodriguesfowler.com/) , a British Brazilian novelist from South London. Her first novel, Stubborn Archivist, was published in 2019 in the UK and USA. Yara was named one of The Observer’s nine hottest-tipped debut novelists of 2019 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. She is also a trustee of Latin American Women’s Aid, an organisation that runs the only two refuges in Europe, for and by Latin American women. She’s writing her second novel now, for which she received the John C Lawrence Award from the Society of Authors towards research in Brazil.

So, dear writers and readers, it’s time for some birthday indulgence – treat yourself with some high-quality reading and then sharpen your pencils… the image is the starting point, the rest is up to you,

Love,
Preti, Kristen, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@chikaunigwe (https://twitter.com/chikaunigwe?lang=en)
@lindamannheim (https://twitter.com/LindaMannheim)
@Glen_J_Brown (https://twitter.com/glen_j_brown?lang=en)
@yazzarf (https://twitter.com/yazzarf)