Volume 06, Chapter 01 | Writing Competition Results

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Image by Hannah Coulson

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month, we switched things up and asked you to submit a piece of writing in just 24 hours for a chance to be selected as one of our lead writers. We received over 100 submissions and from these we could pick just three. It was intense, to say the least! With the help of our stellar judges – Bernardine Evaristo, Sam Jordison, Andrew Motion, Eloise Millar and Philippa Sitters – we managed to get 100 down to a longlist of eight, then pick the final three. We would like to thank all of those who submitted such a spectacular array of work and congratulate both the winners and the long- and shortlisted writers:

Winners
Christopher John Eggett – It was decided to fold up my town
Renee Fisher – Twisted Bridges
Suzanne Ushie – Envy

Shortlist
Rishi Dastidar – Spectacle
Emmanuella Dekonor – In the Pink Wash of British Accra
Sharon Jones – Rememberings
Frank McHugh – Elculo
Andrew Strickland – F-Words

Longlist
Valerie Bence – Shades of Pink and a Lighthouse
Alexandra Davis – Is This a Diaorama?
Pat Edwards – Cut Out
Elizabeth Gibson – Leaving Manchester
Motl Lazarus – Misdirections
Hiromi Suzuki – The Quintet of the Holiday Inn Cafe
Jordan Trethewey – Collage Town
Carole Webster – I Opened You Gently Like Paper and Your Skin Made Sense to Me

About the Winners
Our headliner, Renee Fisher, grew up in New Zealand and the UK, studied English Literature and Visual Arts (ideal combo for Visual Verse) and has spent the last few years living in Moscow and Riga, teaching English to children and adults. She now lives in Prague with her partner and baby daughter. Of her writing, Renee said, ‘It has mostly been confined to diaries – a furtive and relentlessly private pursuit – and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to shape it into stories and poems, though they still borrow heavily from my diary habit. I’ll forever be in thrall to first person narratives; journals, travelogues, letters, notes scribbled on scraps of paper, confessions and dreams.’ We are thrilled that the judges have chosen writing from someone who is only just starting to put her work into the world.

Our page two lead is Christopher John Eggett, a writer and poet from Cambridgeshire. He will send you poetry every Friday in his literary newsletter Etch To Their Own (https://medium.com/etch-to-their-own) , where he scratches away at literature’s subtext. Chris is working on a full length collection of poetic essays including Essay on Falling {insert poem here} (https://softcartel.com/2018/08/06/essay-on-falling-insert-poem-here-what-we-can-see-from-here-by-christopher-john-eggett/) , and occasionally writes short stories about accidentally having a lobster for a boyfriend (https://burninghousepress.com/2018/03/30/the-boyfriend-pinch-by-christopher-john-eggett/) . His work has appeared in Euonia Review (https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/you-are-good-for-poetry/) , The City Quill (https://medium.com/cjeggett/poetry-featured-in-the-city-quill-455ab0a7c688) and Furtive Dalliance and can be found upcoming in Bone & Ink and Human Repair Kit. He tweets as @CJEggett
(https://twitter.com/CjEggett) and you can read more about him on his website https://cjeggett.co.uk/

And on page three we are delighted to publish Suzanne Ushie, who was born and raised in Calabar, Nigeria. In 2012, she was awarded an international scholarship to undertake the MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she made Distinction. Her work has appeared in OZY, Saraba, Fiction Fix, Conte Online, Lunch Ticket, Brittle Paper, Gambit: Newer African Writing and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, Writers Omi at Ledig House, Ox-Bow School of Arts and The Whiting Foundation. She lives in Lagos, Nigeria.

About the Judging
The long-longlist was made from a day of reading through over 100 submissions, getting that down to a longlist, and then a shortlist of eight. The shortlist went to our judges over the weekend, and we made sure they were judged blind, without bylines. When we got the results in, most of the judges had overlaps in what they chose, with slight variation. With a very scientific points system, we tallied up the winners. And if we had published four pieces, or five, our two very close runners up would have been in there – In the Pink Wash of British Accra by Emmanuella Dekonor and F-Words by Andrew Strickland – you can read them on the site now.

Our judges were extremely impressed by the quality of the writing. Philippa Sitters from DGA literary agency said:

“These submissions were so accomplished, I find it hard to believe they were turned around within an hour. They’re a display of genuine talent and it was incredibly fun to read such an array of pieces inspired by the single visual. Congratulations to all those who entered.”

Sam Jordison from Galley Beggar Press said:

“I was impressed by these submissions. More than that, I enjoyed them. There are serious ideas and intentions behind them all, but the thing that most struck me was how good it is to see writers having fun with the language and ideas. There are creative sparks flying around their words… The three Galley Beggar choices exemplified that spirit of adventure. They felt fresh and exploratory. They were also written with wit and humour and grace – and because of that the emotional punches they packed were all the stronger.”

All of your writing this month is in response to a wonderful, quirky collage by London-based Scottish artist Hannah Coulson (https://www.hannahcoulson.co.uk/) , an illustrator who loves experimenting with shapes and colours. When she’s not busily illustrating, Hannah teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. She made this work without any intention and we love that it has come full circle on Visual Verse, where we ask you to respond without any intention.

So, dear writers, with so much excellence still to publish, we’re so glad to be five and thank you very much for being part of the amazing community that is Visual Verse.

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

Kristen, Preti, Lucie
(And welcome to our newest team member, volunteer Editorial Assistant, Luke!)

Volume 04, Chapter 01 | November 2016

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Image by Hernan Bas

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Happy Birthday! Visual Verse is three years old this month and we are thrilled to continue to grow this very special publication. We now have well over 1000 writers and readers getting this newsletter each month and we receive up to 150 submissions with each new issue. Over the last three years we have published writers from around the world – New Zealand to Scotland and Argentina to Japan. Some have been nominees (and even winners) of Bookers, Goldsmiths and Polari prizes. Some have gone on to publish debut novels and short story collections. We have championed big names and up-and-coming ones, from small presses and none – and every month we find our inbox stuffed full of the best, the freshest, the most exciting and radical writing from around the world. Today we celebrate Visual Verse as a platform for new writing, no matter where it comes from, and we celebrate you. Our writers who have made Visual Verse what it is.

A birthday for Visual Verse means the start of a brand new volume. Volume 04, Chapter 01 features Miami-born artist Hernan Bas (http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/hernan-bas) , the candle on our cake. His work is often inspired by stories, full of literary intrigue and tinged with nihilistic romanticism and old world imagery; he says his influences include Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysman. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and at the 53rd Venice Biennale. His work is part of the permanent collections of New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art among others.

Hernan’s works are stories that unfold and Visual Verse is nothing if not an act of translation: the world and all its art transformed into words. This month we decided to go even more meta and lead with some fantastic writers who are also actual translators. For where would literature be without these multilingual multi-talents?

The icing our cake is a lead piece by Maureen Freely, the author of three works of non fiction and seven novels, including, most recently, Sailing through Byzantium, an elegy to the art of thinking in many languages. She is also the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, and a number of memoirs, biographies, rising stars and 20th century classics. Her translation with Alexander Dawe of The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, was awarded the Modern Languages Association Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work in 2014. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Sunday Times for three decades, writing on feminism, family and social policy, Turkish culture and politics, and contemporary writing. As President of English PEN, she champions free expression worldwide. As the former chair of the Translators Association, she also works with campaigns aiming to promote world
literature in English translation. It’s wonderful to celebrate Visual Verse with her.

Our cake’s first layer comes from Cecilia Rossi, originally from Buenos Aires, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia, where she now works as a Lecturer in Literature and Translation and convenes the MA in Literary Translation. Her original poetry has appeared in several journals including Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review. In 2010, her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Poems were published by Waterloo Press. In 2013 she won a British Academy Small Grant to undertake research into the Pizarnik Papers at Princeton University Library. Her latest translations of Pizarnik’s prose texts and excerpts from her journals appeared in Music and Literature No. 6.

The ganache is by Saskia Vogel (http://www.saskiavogel.com) , who has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, Sight & Sound, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.

And the final layer is by Jeffrey M. Angles, who has spent his life traveling back and forth between Japan, where he lived for many years, and the US, where he is a professor of Japanese literature and translation at Western Michigan University. He is the award-winning translator of dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets. He believes strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career has focused on the translation of socially engaged, feminist, or queer writers into English. He writes poetry in both English and Japanese, and his collection of Japanese-language poetry Watashi no hizuke henkō sen (My International Date Line) was published by Shichōsha in 2016.

As an extra slice, if you want to hear more about the art of translating fiction, tune in to BBC Radio 3 on 24th November at 10pm when Preti will be picking some of the latest brilliant new books recently translated into English, and discussing them live.

Enjoy the flavours, dear writers, then get inspired, and send us presents we can share.

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

Kristen and Preti

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