Volume 10, Chapter 11 | September 2023

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Image by Kitty Harrison x Dylan Sauerwein

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Behold: the penultimate issue of Visual Verse. Make your words count this month, dear writers. Some of you have been asking what will happen to the Visual Verse website (https://visualverse.org) after our final issue next month. Rest assured that your words are not going anywhere. We are finalising plans with a brilliant partner who will take over the website and ensure it stays online for the foreseeable future. There are no immediate plans to publish new issues but it is certainly a possibility for the future, under the direction of our successor. More to come on this when we launch our final issue next month.

For now, enjoy this little collage by me, Kristen “Kitty” Harrison, remixing a glorious moon image by photographer Dylan Sauerwein. It could almost be an homage to that rare Blue Supermoon of three nights ago; a moon that came and went behind a fog of Melbourne cloud and thus remains an enigma to me. There are endless stories in the sky, especially at night, and I have created this work to begin the next story with you.

For our featured wordsmiths this month, we have made space for some of our most-published writers from the past decade.

Our lead writer for September is an absolute favourite here at Visual Verse and we could not let it pass without bringing his work to the fore once more. Rishi Dastidar (https://twitter.com/BetaRish?s=20) is a writer and editor whose third collection, Neptune’s Projects (https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/neptune-s-projects) , is published in the UK by Nine Arches Press. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the-craft) (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of T (https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/maisie-lawrence/too-young-too-loud-too-different/9781472155054/) oo Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (http://) (Corsair). If you do one thing for your poetry selves, make sure you follow Rishi and his work.

We first published our next writer, Angi Holden (https://twitter.com/josephsyard?s=20) , in 2015 and she has amassed over 40 pieces (https://visualverse.org/writers/angi-holden/) of ekphrastic writing with us. Angi is a retired lecturer whose prose and poetry explores aspects of her identity – wife and mother, academic and teacher, writer, gardener and craftsperson.

Lee Evans has also recently retired, from the Bath Family YMCA. He lives in Bath, Maine (USA) with his wife. With this gift of retirement he is devoting more time to building castles in the air… and putting words on the page. He can continue his legacy with Visual Verse (https://visualverse.org/writers/lee-evans/) which started with his first piece published in 2016.

And finally, Myfanwy Cook (http://myfanwycook.com) , also writing under the name Vanni Cook (https://visualverse.org/writers/vanni-cook/) , is another prolific contributor to Visual Verse with her first piece published in 2014. Myfanwy designs and teaches an eclectic range of creative workshops and is a devotee of words and their power to change lives in a positive way. She currently works with medical students in the U.K. to bridge the communication gap with patients and loves encouraging aspiring writers of all genres to share their work. Her own published work includes poetry, short stories, articles and novels.

While you are writing this month, keep space in your thoughts for poet Gboyega Odubanjo (https://www.gofundme.com/f/gboyega-odubanjo-beloved-son-brother-friend?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer) , for whom the British poetry community is deeply grieving. His death this week has come as a huge shock and there are many questions unanswered. You can show your support by reading and sharing his words (some of which can be found at the Poetry Society (https://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/gboyega-obubanjo/) or circulating on social media (https://twitter.com/gisselleyepes/status/1697269661677592717?s=20) ) and donating to his family’s fundraiser (https://www.gofundme.com/f/gboyega-odubanjo-beloved-son-brother-friend?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer) to establish the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers. Our heartfelt sympathies to Gboyega’s family and friends.

So there you have it. You know what to do now: the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. Submissions close 15th September.

With love,

Kristen
(with Preti, Isabel, Lucie, Ashish, Zaynab and Wes)

Find the VV crew on socials:
Visual Verse (https://twitter.com/pretitaneja/)
Kristen Harrison (https://www.instagram.com/kittyharrison/)
Preti Taneja (https://twitter.com/PretiTaneja)
Lucie Stevens (https://twitter.com/LucieStevens_)
Ashish Kumar (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude) Singh (https://twitter.com/Ashish_stJude)
Zaynab Bobi (https://twitter.com/ZainabBobi)
Wes White (https://twitter.com/archaeologyBoy)

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

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@maryjean_chan (https://twitter.com/maryjean_chan)
@noosarowiwa (https://twitter.com/noosarowiwa)
@crossmansusanna (https://twitter.com/crossmansusanna)

Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
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Volume 06, Chapter 12 | October 2019

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Image by Valérie Mannaerts/M Museum Leuven/Alexandra Colmenares.

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Never have our bodies, minds and countries felt so under pressure and fragmented. Yet strangely, art that serves to reflect on that can be strangely healing, and indeed, community building. At Visual Verse we are all about community. So this month we bring you our very special edition of ‘recommend a writer’, where we have asked some of our dear lead contributors to call on a fellow writer they think we should publish. Our co-founders, Preti and Kristen, have put two forward as well.

Our community of wordsmiths is enriched by the creators of our visual prompts. This issue of Visual Verse is published in collaboration with M-Museum Leuven (https://www.mleuven.be/nl/content/home) in Belgium, who are hosting the 51st conference of the International Visual Literacy Association later this month. They have provided the arresting image for October – a work by Valérie Mannaerts (https://www.maniera.be/creators/12/valerie-mannaerts) , photographed by Alexandra Colmenares.

Our writer responses kick off with Sabeena Akhtar (https://twitter.com/pocobookreader?lang=en) , who Preti believes is ‘a writer and activist of rare talent and commitment.’ Sabeena is the editor of the anthology, Cut From The Same Cloth (https://unbound.com/books/cut-from-the-same-cloth/) , forthcoming from Unbound, a contributor to the 404 Ink title, We Shall Fight Until We Win (https://www.404ink.com/store/we-shall-fight-until-we-win) and the Saqi Books title, Smashing It (https://saqibooks.com/books/the-westbourne-press/smashing-it/) . She is the Festival Coordinator of Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , and a co-founder of the Primadonna (https://www.primadonnafestival.com/) festival and Bare Lit Kids. She is co-writing a forthcoming children’s book on Islamophobia published by Hachette, and working on her debut novel.

Our page 2 writer – poet Holly Singlehurst (https://twitter.com/HJSinglehurst?lang=en) – was recommended by critically acclaimed poet Rishi Dastidar, one of our longest and most regular contributors. Rishi says: ‘Holly is a poet you might not have heard of yet – but you will. She tells us what it is like to be alive in the world right now, in ways that startle and reveal’. Holly graduated from Birmingham University with a Master’s in Creative Writing in 2016. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize, and was commended in the 2016 National Poetry Competition for her poem ‘Hiroshima, 1961’. Her poetry has appeared on And Other Poems (https://andotherpoems.com/) and her short fiction has been published in Banshee Magazine.

Niven Govinden, author of the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize shortlisted This Brutal House, recommended ‘the genius Stuart Evers (https://twitter.com/StuartEvers?lang=en) ,’ whose debut, Ten Stories About Smoking, won the London Book Award in 2011, and his highly acclaimed novel, If This is Home (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/stuart-evers/if-this-is-home/9781447207634) , followed in 2012. Your Father Sends His Love (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/stuart-evers/your-father-sends-his-love/9781447280583) was shortlisted for the 2016 Edge Hill Short Story Prize and a new novel will be published in 2020. In 2017, Evers won the Eccles British Library Writer’s Award – one of Europe’s richest prizes for a work in progress.

Finally, Kristen spotted the ‘fiercely imaginative and quirky’ work of Eileen McNulty-Holmes (https://twitter.com/eileenamholmes?lang=en) at a recent visual writing workshop, and immediately wanted to published them at Visual Verse. Eileen is an award-winning writer, award-nominated editor, an aspiring witch and a (semi-) professional plant person. They have been writing for money, attention, and “exposure” for the past 10 years. Their work has appeared in the likes of Femsplain (https://femsplain.com/) , DADDY Magazine (http://daddy.land/) , For Every Year and IRIS, as well as in multidisciplinary shows at galleries including Lage Egal and Mindscape Universe. Their stories often take place at the fringes of reality, in enclosed spaces or in the midst of terrible life decisions.

So as you sharpen your pencils, why not follow our lead and recommend us to a writer/friend? The image is the starting point, the text is up to you…

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://thecurvedhouse.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=34f4a503c2c926849e17dcf6f&id=02acdc9fd3&e=c32c18dbf0)
@pocobookreader (https://twitter.com/pocobookreader)
@HJSinglehurst (https://twitter.com/HJSinglehurst)
@StuartEvers (https://twitter.com/stuartevers?lang=en)
@eileenamholmes (https://twitter.com/eileenamholmes?lang=en)
Start Timer (https://vclock.com/timer/#countdown=01:00:00&enabled=0&seconds=3600&title=Visual+Verse%3A+One+image.+One+Hour.+50-500+Words.+)
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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 05, Chapter 01 | November 2017

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Image by Alicia Bock courtesy of Stocksy (https://www.stocksy.com/ALICIABOCK)

Curated in collaboration with Creative Review’s Storytelling issue (https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-storytelling-issue-oct-nov-2017/)

Dear writers, readers and friends,

HAPPY FOURTH BIRTHDAY.
Welcome to the very special fourth birthday edition of Visual Verse. We, your loyal publishers, are so very proud. We cannot believe that this project, begun on a creative whim in 2013, has flourished to become the avant-garde online citadel of your ongoing construction. It has survived our day jobs for four years and sometimes we think we have survived because of Visual Verse. Thank you all.

Over the past four years we have commissioned big names and supported emerging ones, we’ve published over 4000 pieces while you’ve been writing your own collections, stories and novels – and getting published and winning prizes yourselves. We’ve celebrated it all with our weird and wonderful tweets (over 4000 of those, a fitting number for our fourth year) and with various events, workshops and partnerships that have seen Visual Verse come alive in gallery spaces, within artists’ projects, as part of performance pieces, and now… in print.

We are so excited to celebrate our birthday issue with a collaboration with Creative Review (https://www.creativereview.co.uk/) , a magazine that regularly inspires us with features about the best of the best in the book design world, as well as the best of the best across the whole spectrum of art and design. Thanks to their lovely Deputy Editor, Mark Sinclair, we have been able to play a small role in helping their latest issue come together. Their October/November issue is a storytelling special in which they ask: could a picture be a starting point? What kind of responses might a single image evoke? They asked their readers to select an image to be featured on the cover and reader Stuart McFerrers suggested the image you see above, by artist Alicia Bock (http://www.aliciabock.com/) via the Stocksy photo library (https://www.stocksy.com/ALICIABOCK) . We helped commission writers to respond to the image by asking a handful of VV contributors whose work always makes us
smile – for reasons of style, substance and sheer visual verve – to respond. They are published in the print issue of Creative Review magazine, and as our supporting leads on Visual Verse. In no particular order they are Susanna Crossman, Drew Milne, Rishi Dastidar, Hazel Mason, Clare Archibald, Elizabeth Gibson and Angela Young. Grab hold of a copy of Creative Review to support us, the writers and the power of creative collaboration.

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-storytelling-issue-oct-nov-2017/

As you know we also support small presses, and often publish lead writers who come from the UK’s leading independent publishers including Fitzcarraldo, Comma, Peepal Tree, And Other Stories and Galley Beggar Press. So it’s only right our lead piece this month is written by the ultimate small press champion Neil Griffiths. Not only is he the author of two previous novels – Betrayal in Naples (Penguin), winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel, and Saving Caravaggio (Penguin), shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year with a new novel – he also has a new book out by Dodo Ink, As a God Might Be, published last month. Neil also co-founded the Republic of Consciousness Prize (http://www.republicofconsciousness.com/) for Small Presses and is an all-round wonder and gift. Follow him at @neilgriffiths (http://www.twitter.com/neilgriffiths) .

We couldn’t do what we do without our patrons, one of whom – Cathy Galvin – is co-founder of The Word Factory. She’s also the brains behind the wonderful C (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/events/) itizens: The New Story (http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/citizen-festival/) festival taking place in London from 10-12 November and featuring an amazing line up (including more than a few VV-ers) – so get down there, and get into it.

As the new Visual Verse year begins, here are our birthday wishes: that you keep writing, keep submitting, keep reading, keep tweeting – help us make it to five. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Birthday love,
Preti and Kristen

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Volume 03, Chapter 01 | November 2015

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Celebrating our 2nd birthday.
Image by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Dear Writers,

Welcome to our 2nd birthday edition, and the beginning of our third volume. How far we have come! In April 2013 we came up with a mad plan to celebrate the inter-collaborative process of writing and art. We wanted to create a contemporary digital platform for cross-pollinating visual arts and literature and we had two rules: 1) there would be set generative constraints, and 2) the site had to be elegant, reflecting traditional book design. Kristen is a publisher of beautiful books (http://www.thecurvedhouse.com/) , Preti is a writer (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk) , Pete Lewis is a designer (http://www.mrpetelewis.com/) of the highest order… and so in November 2013, Visual Verse was born.

When we first launched we were publishing about 30 submissions a month. A watershed moment came in March 2014, when Denise Nestor (http://www.denisenestorillustration.com/) ’s pencil drawing of birds alongside Adam Marek’s The Factory Explosion (https://visualverse.org/submissions/factory-explosion/) in the lead caught your imaginations. Overnight submissions exploded and we had 80 wonderful pieces on the site. In October this year, for the first time, we published over 100 amazing pieces.

Every day that we publish you, we feel delighted and honoured. As the site grows we are refreshed by your commitment, your imagination and your energy. A look at our writers reveals familiar names such as Stella Duffy, Adam Foulds and Nikesh Shukla; and names who we published as they were becoming ‘names’: Eley Williams, Nisha Ramayya, Sandeep Parmar, Sophie Mayer, Declan Ryan, Hedley Twiddle – the list goes on. We have contributors from across Africa, the USA, UK, Indonesia and more… Visual Verse is now a chorus of global voices.

We couldn’t have got this far without our patrons: writers Andrew Motion, Ali Smith, Cathy Galvin and Bernardine Evaristo, and photographers Mark Garry and Marc Schlossman. Thanks go to them.

Now, to meet the party and begin our third year. As a nod to our love of, and respect for, beautiful book design we feature an image by one of the UK’s leading designers, Coralie-Bickford Smith (http://cb-smith.com/) . Coralie is responsible for many of the stunning Penguin series that grace our shelves including the Great Foods series, the clothbound classics and the exquisite F. Scott Fitzgerald series. This month, Penguin imprint Particular Books have published The Fox and the Star – written, illustrated and designed by Coralie herself. This magical book embodies all that Visual Verse stands for – that moment went words and images wrap themselves around eachother so perfectly that you could never imagine them being apart.

We are absolutely thrilled to be celebrating and leading this month with a piece by Ivan Vladislavić. Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1957, he now lives in Johannesburg. His acclaimed fiction includes Double Negative, The Restless Supermarket and 101 Detectives. His work has won many awards, including Yale University’s prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize in 2015, for which writers receive an unrestricted grant of $150,000 to support their writing. His classic novel The Folly (http://www.andotherstories.org/book/the-folly/) , a sophisticated yet funny book about the power of suggestion and castles in the sky, is published by And Other Stories on 11 sNovember 2015. You read it here first!

Our second lead is the poet Helen Mort, whose first collection ‘Division Street’ was published in 2013 and won the Fenton Aldeburgh prize. She is a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at The University of Leeds.
And to celebrate properly, we have commissioned three pieces from longstanding contributors to the site, whose work we admire every month. Rishi Dastidar is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. A runner-up in the 2011 Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Competition, his work has featured in the 2012 anthologies Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins) and Lung Jazz (Cinnamon Press / Eyewear Publishing), and most recently in 2014’s Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe). He tweets @BetaRish.

Myrto Petsota was born in Athens, Europe. Places of residence during her formative years include countries that no longer exist, countries that are about to disappear and others that are yet to be, namely Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece and Scotland. She now writes from Paris, where she also teaches, practices literary criticism and exile. She is immensely fond of the quarterly French literary review L’Atelier du Roman, where she publishes some of her critical pieces of writing.

And last but not least, Hazel Mason, who describes herself thus: ‘Proud to have been a sister in the NHS, now a happy opsimath in Norwich who has stumbled on the panacea of poetry, postal critiquing and vibrant literary group discussion, wallowing in words.’ She tweets @hazelmason10.

So dear writers, we hope you’ll be inspired to keep submitting, keep tweeting us, keep reading each other and talking about what you like about each others’ work. And we hope to see you all at our second birthday party, in conjunction with The Word Factory and the VS Pritchett short story prize, at Waterstone’s Picadilly on Saturday 28^th November, 6-8pm. Book here: http://www.thewordfactory.tv/site/events/ – we hope to see you there!

In the meantime, amidst all the celebrations, don’t forget what it’s really all about… the image is the starting point: the text is up to you.

Happy 2^nd Birthday Visual Verse!

Preti and Kristen

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