Interview with Paul Stephenson
Paul Stephenson grew up in Cambridge and studied modern languages. He took part in the Jerwood/Aldeburgh mentoring scheme in 2013/14, and has published three poetry pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition judged by Billy Collins; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written while living in Paris at the time of the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He completed an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with the Manchester Writing School and has co-curated Poetry in Aldeburgh 2019 (8-10th November). Paul interviews poets on his blog: www.paulstep.com
Originally published on The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Sharon Black
Originally from Glasgow, Poet, editor and publisher, Sharon Black, now lives in the Cévennes mountains of southern France. Previously Sharon worked as a journalist and taught English in France and Japan. She now works, it seems, tirelessly, running a writing retreat, organising yoga and other events. Her poetry is published widely in UK magazines and journals. Sharon has won first prizes in Ilkley Literature Festival Poetry Competition, Sentinel Annual Poetry Competition, The Frogmore Prize, Envoi International Poetry Prize, Manchester Cathedral Prize, Manchester Poets & Players, and The London Magazine. To Know Bedrock is her first collection. Her second, The Art of Egg, was published in 2015 by Two Ravens Press (available directly from Sharon, via her website.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Yvonne Reddick
Dr. Yvonne Reddick, born in Glasgow, has lived in Aberdeen, Berkshire and Kuwait. An award-winning poet and the author of three poetry pamphlets, Yvonne won a Northern Writers’ Award for poetry in 2016, was awarded a Jerwood/Arvon mentorship and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2017, and has recently been awarded a Peggy Poole Award. Yvonne’s poems have appeared in magazines such as Stand and PN Review, and been translated into Greek and Swedish. She lives in Manchester and works as an academic researcher and lecturer. Her book on Ted Hughes’s environmentalism is published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Nuar Alsadir
Nuar Alsadir is a poet, writer, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of the poetry collections Fourth Person Singular (2017), a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Collection in England and Ireland; and More Shadow Than Bird (Salt Publishing, 2012). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Slate, Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, and the Poetry Review. Alsadir is a fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities, on the faculty at New York University, and she works as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Zeina Hashem Beck
Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet who won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her second collection, Louder than Hearts, about which Naomi Shihab Nye wrote, ‘Everything Arabic we treasure comes alive in these poems’. Zeina is also the author of two 2016 chapbooks: 3arabi Song, which was selected as winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and There Was and How Much There Was, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy. Zeina's first book, To Live in Autumn, focusing on Beirut, won the 2013 Backwaters Prize and was a runner-up for the 2014 Julie Suk Award.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Di Slaney
Di Slaney’s second publication, and first full collection, Reward for Winter, tells the story of her move from an urban existence to life as custodian of an ancient farmhouse in Nottinghamshire. I can recommend the moving book for its precise poetry insight into life on the farm and what comes across as great eye for the details of history. I wanted to interview Di to find out a little more about her writing and her unconventional and demanding lifestyle, which includes being owner of Candlestick Press.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Katherine Towers
Katharine Towers’ first poetry collection 'The Floating Man' was published by Picador in 2010, won the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. A poem from the collection was selected as a Poem on the Underground.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
Her second collection, The Remedies is also published by Picador and was shortlisted for the 2016 TS Eliot Prize. Katharine's poems have appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The North and in several anthologies including the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. She is currently Poet in Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Katharine was born in London and read Modern Languages at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. In 2007 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
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Interview with Maria Taylor
Maria Taylor, a poet living in Leicestershire, edits reviews for Under the Radar, and teaches Creative Writing at De Montfort University. Her latest publication is Instructions for Making Me, (HappenStance, 2016). Her first collection, Melanchrini, (Nine Arches Press, 2012), was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Sandeep Parmar
Sandeep Parmar was born in England and raised in Southern California. A poet and a critic, specialising in modernist women's writing, she received her PhD from University College London and her MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her books include: Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman (Bloomsbury), a scholarly edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet) and the Selected Poems of Nancy Cunard (Carcanet), and two books of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard and Eidolon (Shearsman). Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, Poetry Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Financial Times and the Times Higher Education. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker, a curator of the 2016 Liverpool Biennial and Co-Director of the University of Liverpool's Centre for New and International Writing where she is Senior Lecturer in English Literature.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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Interview with Pauline Rowe: Carried in Your Heart
Pauline Rowe is a poet living in Liverpool with her husband and six children. Pauline’s poetry has been widely published both online and in print, in, among others, The Rialto, Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, The Reader, Envoi, Dreamcatcher, Obsessed with Pipework, and Orbis. She has also published two collections of poetry: Waiting for the Brown Trout God (Headland Publications, 2009), and Voices of the Benares (Lapwing Publications, 2014). Pauline is researching for a PhD in Creative Writing at Liverpool University, works as Poet-in-Residence at Mersey Care NHS Trust, and is a founder member of the charity North End Writers.
Originally published in The Honest Ulsterman
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