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