Volume 07, Chapter 07 | May 2020

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Image from Getty Open Content Program

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Dear writers, readers and friends,

Last month we launched our #dailyvisual project on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/visualverseanthology/) . We offer a new image every day and invite you to write 5-50 words in response (see below for a selection). It is a short, impulsive exercise designed to both cleanse the mind and entice new ideas.

The act of doing a daily call-and-response made us realise that Visual Verse is very much a pulse-taker. It is a record of events that have affected us all over the past seven years, and a collection of words that absorb our shared experiences. In that sense, we have created, together with you, a unique literary and historical artefact. It is our goal over the coming years to ensure that this publication is preserved, whether it be in print or catalogued digitally with the British Library. There is considerable work and cost involved and if you have any ideas that can help please contact our curator and Publisher, Kristen Harrison: (kristen@thecurvedhouse.com).

In the meantime, we continue to experience isolation with varying degrees of acceptance and anxiety. Whether you are trying to write, trying to read, finding it hard or easy, one thing is certain: you are not alone. Our glorious image this month is a mummy portrait (http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/8213/unknown-maker-mummy-portrait-of-a-youth-romano-egyptian-ad-150-200/) dated 150-200 AD, from Getty’s open content program. Since translation is what we are all doing these days, metaphorically speaking, we are very proud to bring you three of the world’s best literary translators, and thinkers about translation; all critically acclaimed writers in their own right.

Our first page is for Kate Briggs, a writer and translator based in Rotterdam, NL, where she teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute. She is the author of the extraordinary This Little Art (https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/this-little-art ) (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a long essay on the practice of literary translation informed by her own experiences of translating Roland Barthe’s last lecture courses. We love this book. It was a finalist for a Believer Book Award, and a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and The Paris Review: it is now being translated into five languages. She is working on a new book, an essayistic novel titled The Long Form, forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions.

On page two, we are very excited to publish Jennifer Croft, author of the moving Homesick (https://www.unnamedpress.com/books/book?title=Homesick) and Serpientes y escaleras and the co-winner, with Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, of The International Booker Prize for Flights.

Our page three features Marilyn Booth who lived in Egypt for a number of years, and by coincidence, these portraits have long-fascinated her. She has translated many works of fiction from the Arabic, most recently Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (https://www.sandstonepress.com/books/celestial-bodies ) , for which she and Alharthi jointly won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, by Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud. She is currently translating Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost, winner of the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and Jokha al-Harthi’s most recent novel, Narinjah: Bitter Orange. Marilyn tells us that many years ago she wrote a Dphil dissertation at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on a young Alexandrian poet exiled from Egypt in 1919. Now, she holds the Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Chair for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oriental Institute and Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her scholarly interests
include gender history, Arabophone intellectual and literary history, historical translation studies, and vernacular writing. Recent scholarly books are Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History in fin-de-siècle Egypt and (as editor and contributor) Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean. Soon to be completed is Feminist thinking in fin-de-siècle Egypt: The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz.

So, dear readers, May is the month of speaking as if from centuries in the future. Words that might last thousands of years…

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

Kristen, Preti, Lucie and Luke

P.S. If you love this series, check out our archive (https://visualverse.org/images/) where we have work from more leading writer/translators including Maureen Freely, Haider Shabaz, Sohini Basak, Jen Calleja and more…

Connect with us
@visual_verse (https://twitter.com/visual_verse?lang=en)
@jenniferlcroft (https://twitter.com/jenniferlcroft)
@FitzcarraldoEds (https://twitter.com/FitzcarraldoEds)
@sandstonepress (https://twitter.com/sandstonepress)
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.+)
Submit (https://visualverse.org/submit/)

** #DailyVisual
————————————————————
Join us every day on Instagram for a 15-minute, 5-50 word writing challenge.
Here is a selection of submissions from the past month.

Washed and refilled
the birdbath today.

Chaffinch arrived.
Took a drink.
Bathed.
Left behind
a rose-coloured feather.

Then crows.
Three of them.
Fighting.
Water level
dropped by half.

Then a pigeon.
Wings lifted for airing.
A tidal splash flooding
the tulips and
emptied the birdbath.
Another day unravelling.

by @miskybr (https://www.instagram.com/miskybr/)

The late afternoon is holding onto the day’s heat. The air smells like rosemary. They share an orange, cold from the fridge, fat segments of sunshine.

by @rach_is_reading (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/)

Today I opened my eyes, I saw the words I wanted to say shouting in my head, I set them free.

by @hazelmason4544 (https://www.instagram.com/hazelmason4544/)

It’s always the horse that dies
in wars
A noble death
for a noble beast
The men she served
share mournful
meaningful looks
and ride her spotted back one final time
from thundering craters and bloodied wire
to faraway fields and gentle hills
the memory of a sheltering roof
Home.

by @ (https://www.instagram.com/hazelmason4544/) bennybombdrop (https://www.instagram.com/bennybombdrop/)

We may applaud the cooperation; we may rebuke the crime; we often fail to understand the situation.

by @ (https://www.instagram.com/rach_is_reading/) georginaburtenshaw (https://www.instagram.com/georginaburtenshaw/)

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Volume 05, Chapter 12 | October 2018

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Image by Mark Basarab

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month we bring you the final issue in Volume 5 of Visual Verse. To celebrate, we have handed the editorial over to one of our dearest friends, So Mayer – a writer, curator and activist. Her recent books include Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015), and recent projects include the touring programme Revolt, She Said: Women and Film After ’68 (http://www.clubdesfemmes.com/revolt-she-said/) with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and Raising our Game (https://www.raisingfilms.com/resources/raising-our-game-report/) , a report addressing exclusion in the film industry with campaigners Raising Films. Current writing projects include Disturbing Words (https://tinyletter.com/sophiemayer/) , a tinyletter about language, and a poetry chapbook , due from Litmus (https://www.litmuspublishing.co.uk) this autumn.

So’s selected writers are all radical thinkers and multi-talented artists. We are very excited to have them inspire us this October, responding to a stellar image (sorry, couldn’t resist) by Vancouver photographer Mark Basarab (http://www.markbasarab.com/) .

Warning: this work is dark and blazing – perfect for the times we live in.

Jason Barker is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, comix artist, and occasional stand-up comedian. He has been a co-producer of Transfabulous and a programmer for BFI Flare, the London LGBT Film Festival, where his first feature film A Deal With the Universe (http://adealwiththeuniverse.com/index.html) , a documentary about his pregnancy, had its world premiere. He is the Education Lead for Gendered Intelligence, and facilitator for GI West in Bristol.

Sarah Crewe is a working class feminist poet from Liverpool. Her first full poetry collection, floss, is upcoming from Aquifer Books (http://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/category/aquifer-press/) this winter. Her work has featured in Tenebrae, Litmus, Cumulus, zarf and Datableed. Her most recent pamphlet was weimar after dark: fourteen poems on fassbinder’s berlin alexanderplatz (contact Sarah on Twitter to order).

Sachiko Murakami (Canada) is the author of three collections of poetry: The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks 2008), Rebuild (Talonbooks 2011), and Get Me Out of Here (Talonbooks 2015). She has been a literary worker for numerous presses, journals, and organizations, and most recently was the 2017 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. Her projects include Project Rebuild (http://www.projectrebuild.ca/) , HENKŌ (http://powellstreethenko.ca/) , WIHTBOAM (http://www.whenihavethebodyofaman.com/) and FIGURE (http://www.figureoracle.com/) .

Anna Coatman is a writer and editor from Leeds, now based in London. In the past she has worked at I.B. Tauris, RA Magazine and Sight & Sound, and is currently Senior Commissioning Editor for BFI, Film & Media at Bloomsbury. She was one of the founding editors of 3 of Cups Press and has contributed to publications including frieze, TLS, LRB and The White Review. She is currently working on a project concerning women and social realism, and will be chairing a panel discussion titled ‘Whose Story?: Working Class Women on Screen (https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=3C59E017-BF84-40D4-B379-AA6A43060C85&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=688F7842-DE4B-4183-9CF3-05F7778DAC4C) ’ on 9 October at BFI Southbank in London.

Jules Koostachin is a band member of Attawapiskat First Nation, Moshkekowok territory, and she currently resides in Vancouver. She is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, with a research focus on Indigenous documentary. Her television series AskiBOYZ (2016) is currently airing on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. In the fall of 2018, Jules’ latest short film OChiSkwaCho premieres at ImagineNative, and she publishes her first book of poetry Unearthing Secrets, Gathering Truths (Kegedonce Press, 2018). Her short films PLACEnta and NiiSoTeWak screen at the 12th Native Spirit (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/12th-native-spirit-indigenous-film-festival-2018-canadakent-placenta-niisotewak-with-jules-tickets-50317019560) Film Festival in London on 18 Oct.

And now, dear writers, October is yours. Do your best – keep reading, get inspired and send us your 50-500 words written in the space of one hour, by 15 October. We will publish up to 100 of the best of them. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

So, Preti, Kristen and Lucie

Volume 05, Chapter 09 | July 2018

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Image by Namroud Gorguis
Guest Editor: Richard Georges

Dear writers, readers and friends,

We do get around. Words circle and come back. Lives and geographies and time fold and touch. We talk and we talk and we talk. Back in May, our editor was delighted to take part in a panel for Bare Lit (http://barelitfestival.com/) , the UK’s literary festival featuring writers of colour working in every genre you can think of. Over chats about mythology and monsters, Preti met poet Richard Georges, who is from the British Virgin Islands. They got talking about colonial territories, and Preti invited him to curate Visual Verse for July. Richard is the author of the poetry collections Make Us All Islands (Shearsman Books) and Giant (Platypus Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prelude, Smartish Pace, The Poetry Review, wildness, Wasafiri, decomP, The Rusty Toque, Reservoir, L’Ephemere, The White Review and elsewhere.

About his Visual Verse selection, Richard says, ‘I am delighted to compile work for Visual Verse solicited exclusively from some of the most spellbinding poets I know who also happen to be citizens of colonial spaces. Ana Portnoy Brimmer from Puerto Rico (an unincorporated territory of the United States), Arturo Desimone from Aruba (a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), and Chris Astwood from Bermuda, Erika Jeffers from Montserrat, and myself from the British Virgin Islands (all British Overseas Territories).’ We are delighted to have Richard’s own work in our lead spot, followed by this brilliant selection.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a Puerto Rican poet whose work has been published or is forthcoming in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, Kweli Journal, Poets Reading The News, Project Censored, Centro Journal, Moko, and elsewhere. For more on her work, visit her website (http://anaportnoybrimmer.com/ ) .

Arturo Desimone (http://arturoblogito.wordpress.com) is an Arubian-Argentinian writer and visual artist. His articles, poetry, and short fiction have previously appeared in CounterPunch, Círculo de Poesía, Moko, Drunken Boat, Acentos Review, and New Orleans Review. His translations have appeared in Blue Lyra Review and Adirondack Review.

Chris Astwood (http://www.chrisastwood.com/) is a Bermudian poet currently residing in the UK and completing a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia. His writing has recently appeared in sx Salon and Caribbean Quarterly. A pamphlet of linked poems entitled JANE DOE is forthcoming from Gatehouse Press.

And finally, Erika Jeffers (https://www.erikajeffers.com/) – a poet and book reviewer whose writing has appeared in Kweli, Callaloo, sx salon, Wasafiri, Adrienne, and Moko; she’s also a reader for Frontier Poetry. Currently based in Brooklyn, she’s at work on her first full-length poetry collection.

All of them have responded to an image so full of stories, potential, surveillance, entropy and nostalgia – captured by Namroud Gorguis via Unsplash. And so to the long month of July, with all of its potential. Let’s make these worlds of words speak to each other. Looking forward to your submissions dear writers – the image is the starting point, the text is up to you. _x005F _x005F

Richard Georges (Guest Editor)
with Preti, Lucie and Kristen

Volume 04, Chapter 10 | August 2017

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Image by Kassiël Gerrits/CODA Museum

George Spender is currently guest editor for Visual Verse. George is the senior editor of Oberon Books (https://www.oberonbooks.com/) , an independent publisher in London specialising in theatre and performance. This issue is introduced by Visual Verse curator and co-founder, Kristen Harrison.

Dear writers, readers and friends,

This month, I (Kristen) have staged my own little Shakespearean coup. I have overthrown both our guest editor George and our supreme editor-in-chief, Preti Taneja (http://www.preti-taneja.co.uk/) , to commission our lead writer myself. Fear not, for my reasons are pure and good. Our very own Preti has been posited on page one as our lead writer for August at my behest, and after much persuading! August sees the publication of Preti’s first full-length novel, We That Are Young (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/paperback-shop/we-that-are-young) , a remarkable retelling of King Lear set against the rise of nationalism in contemporary India. Her publisher, Galley Beggar Press, call it “superb” while Andrew Motion has said the book is “Utterly engrossing, very smart, very moving… Subtle, ambitious and highly original”. Last month it was tipped by Justine Jordan, literary editor of the Guardian, as one of her Booker longlist predictions for 2017
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/jul/26/the-man-booker-prize-2017-longlist-who-should-be-on-it) . Preti has given a huge amount to Visual Verse since we launched, publishing literally thousands of submissions month-by-month, and developing a vibrant, talented community of writers. We would be nothing without her so to force her hand from editor to writer was a no-brainer. This is the only way for us, her Visual Verse family, to celebrate her debut. You can read the first chapter (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/extract-we-that-are-young-taneja) of We That Are Young on the lovely Galley Beggar website and you can also order one of 500 limited edition copies (https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/shop-1/ehisxs910lbr9bpmdvl044yhkaofz7) , otherwise keep an eye out for it in all good bookshops from August 10.

So, here we unveil your glorious visual prompt by Dutch artist Kassiël Gerrits (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kassi%C3%ABl_Gerrits) . It has two of my favourite aesthetic characteristics: the texture of a hand-printed work and perfect symmetry. Bliss. Preti kicks us off with a beautifully formed Three Lessons and she is followed by an exciting trio of writers commissioned by George.

On page 2 we present Livia Franchini (http://www.unitedagents.co.uk/livia-franchini) , a bilingual writer and literary translator from Tuscany, Italy. Her work has been featured, or is forthcoming, in Hotel, La Errante, The Quietus, 3AM: Magazine, LESTE and The White Review, among others. Her new English translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road to the City is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute and is forthcoming with Twins Editions in 2017. Her Italian translations of Eileen Gunn and James Tiptree Jr. are forthcoming with Nero Edizioni in 2017. In 2016 she co-founded CORDA, a journal about friendship in the time of new borders. She is one of the writers-in-residence for the European project CELA, which will see her work translated into six different languages. Livia lives in London, and is currently working on her first novel. She is represented by Zoe Ross at United Agents. Find Livia on Twitter @livfranchini (https://twitter.com/@livfranchini) .

Next up we have Phil Porter (https://twitter.com/philipporter) , an award-winning playwright whose works include Blink (Soho Theatre), Vice Versa (Royal Shakespeare Company), The Man With The Hammer (Plymouth Theatre Royal) and The Christmas Truce (RSC). His play The Cracks In My Skin, for Manchester Royal Exchange, won the Bruntwood Award and Stealing Sweets And Punching People was produced by Theatre 503/Off-Broadway. In addition to his own works, Porter has edited and adapted a number of plays including Molière’s The Miser, Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (RSC, with Sean Foley), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (RSC/Little Angel) and Janos Hay’s The Stonewatcher (National Theatre). Phil Tweets at @PhilipPorter (https://twitter.com/@PhilipPorter) .

And last but by no means least, Peter Doggett (http://www.peterdoggett.org/) , a magazine journalist and editor who spent two decades interviewing hundreds of musicians, authors and other public figures before becoming a full-time author ten years ago. In 2000, Penguin Books published his pioneering history of the collision between rock and country music, Are You Ready for the Country, which was later commemorated by a double-CD set issued by Warner Music. In his 2009 book, You Never Give Me Your Money, he traced the seeds of the Beatles’ split, and then followed the desperate and ultimately vain efforts of the four ex-members to deal with the fall-out, and escape its legacy. He is also the author of You Never Give Me Your Money and F**k: An Irreverent History of the F-Word, published under his mischievous pseudonym, Rufus Lodge, for the HarperCollins imprint, The Friday Project. Peter lives in London with the artist and illustrator (and professional counsellor), Rachel
Baylis. Find him on Twitter @Peter_Doggett (https://twitter.com/@Peter_Doggett) .

So writers, where will this bold and abstract prompt take you? You know the score, the image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Enjoy,
Kristen Harrison (Curator and Overthrower)
George Spender (Guest Editor)

—

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Volume 04, Chapter 05 | March 2017

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Image by Tertia Van Rensburg

Dear Writers,

Well, it is spring in our parts of the world (Cambridge and Berlin). That means it’s March so we are bringing you the freshest shoots of the best new art, fiction and poetry to be picked from the bushes as they green. And in contrast, an image with an almost wintery aesthetic – well these are strange times of mixed seasons and feelings – and our job is only to inspire you.

Our image this month is most mysterious, even a little spooky. It is brought to you by a South African photographer, Tertia Van Rensburg, who is equally mysterious and yet has a most epic Pinterest collection here (https://de.pinterest.com/arttantaluz/) .

In response, we are very pleased to bring you a writer, and formerly guest-Editor, of our own Visual Verse, Eley Williams. As well as introducing you to her first book of short stories, Attrib. and Other Stories, which is out this month from Influx Press, she is co-editor of fiction at 3:AM magazine with prose in Ambit, Night & Day, Structo and The White Review. Her collection Attrib. (Influx 2017) was chosen by Ali Smith for the First Light ‘best of debut fiction’ slot at this year’s Cambridge Literary Festival, UK – come if you can, on Saturday 23 April at 1pm. Eley also has a small book of poetry ‘Frit’ forthcoming from Sad Press and her tweets are short works of literary loveliness all by themselves: @GiantRatSumatra (https://twitter.com/@GiantRatSumatra)

Next up is Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster, from Fitzcarraldo Editions, which was published in February – just a week ago, in fact. It has been called, ‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity,’ by the wonderful Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds. Charlie was born in 1991, he lives in London and his work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review. Catch more from him @Ghostwoodfox (https://twitter.com/Ghostwoodfox)

And finally, we are absolutely thrilled to publish Mahtem Shiferraw on Visual Verse. She is a poet and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry collection, Fuchsia, won the Sillerman Prize for African Poets, and her work has been published in various literary magazines. This is writing to make your skin shiver, it is so good.

Enjoy dear writers, and get ready for your own creative rush – then send us your 50-500 words, and we will get publishing soon.

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

Kristen and Preti

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Volume 04, Chapter 03 | January 2017

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Image by Manon Bellet

Dear writers, readers and friends,

Welcome to 2017. This past year has been another wonderful one for Visual Verse. Thanks to you, our writers, we’ve grown in submissions and followers and the inbox is bursting every week. It is such a pleasure to see you continue to return each month and deliver new words. And it is such a pleasure to have a platform from which we can shine a spotlight on fantastic writers, published and unpublished. In 2016 we’ve been proud to feature a Goldsmith’s Prize winner, a Booker longlistee, debut writers and those who have collections forthcoming next year. Some of you have taken work inspired by Visual Verse to the next level – it’s found its way into poetry collections and into live performances as well as onto your own websites. We are thrilled by all of this and can’t wait to see what next year will bring.

One thing you may not realise, too, is how much your writing inspires the artists we feature here on Visual Verse. It is a unique experience for them to see how so many people, with wildly diverse perspectives and styles, respond to their work. This dialogue between artist and writer is the seed from which Visual Verse was grown and it is one of the things that makes us most proud.

So without further ado, we are delighted to bestow upon you our first visual prompt for 2017. This magnificent image comes from Manon Bellet (http://www.manonbellet.com/) , a French artist currently based in New Orleans, US. Bellet’s work looks at the intersections of nature conservation and art preservation, an unconventional pairing, and tries to challenge our perceptions of our environment. This image is from her series Sous Surface and is one of those images that presents something different each time you view it. What will you make of this one?

Our lead writers for January 2017 are a celebration of our connections beyond the geographical. We begin with the elegiac, romantic Emmanuelle Pagano translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Pagano’s fragmentary musings on love and desire, Trysting (http://www.andotherstories.org/author/emmanuelle-pagano/) was published in 2016 by & Other Stories. She lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. A perfect start to our year. Translator Sophie Lewis (https://twitter.com/sophietimes) is a freelance editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Among the writers she has translated into English are Stendhal, Jules Verne, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Marcel
Aymé, Andrée Maalouf, João Gilberto Noll, Pierre Gripari and Emilie de Turckheim. Jennifer Higgins (https://twitter.com/JennyTranslates) is an editor and translator from French and Italian. She has translated several works of fiction, including Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting, and has written a book about English translations of French poetry.

Our second lead is poet Rachel Plummer (http://www.rachelplummer.co.uk) who lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two young children. She has had poems in magazines including Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and Agenda. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for poetry. She has had poems placed in numerous competitions, including the Flambard Prize, Penfro, and the Troubadour Prize.

For our third lead we bring you the robust writings of Agri Ismaïl, who is based in Sweden and Iraq. His work has appeared in The White Review, Guernica, Litro and 3:AM Magazine amongst other places, traversing and transcending all kinds of borders.

And last but not least, our up and coming spot goes to Cage Williams, a poet, writer and musician based in London. He studied literature at Goldsmiths College and he writes on subjects ranging from jazz and the New York School poets to Shakespeare. Find more writing by Cage Williams here (http://literateur.com/four-poems-by-cage-williams/) .

So we go on… boats against the current… pulling into the future. Let us create another year’s worth of beautiful art and words. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.

Preti and Kristen

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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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