Notes on Contributors

Frank Armstrong (@frankarmstrong2) earned a degree in history in University College Dublin before training to be a barrister. He also completed a Masters in Islamic Societies and Cultures in SOAS, and trained to be a secondary school history teacher. Following accusations of being an eternal student, he began writing articles for the Spectator, The London Magazine, as well as Irish publications including Village Magazine, the Dublin Review of Books and the Irish Times. Latterly, he managed a folk band and ran a Dublin venue that combined music with vegan food. Currently he divides his time between writing and teaching. Lana Asfour’s journalism and essays have appeared in the Times, New Statesman, BBC online, Al Jazeera English, OpenDemocracy, Granta, the New York Review of Books blog, Counterpunch, Glamour, and others. Before working as a journalist in London and Beirut, she did a doctorate in English and French Literature at Oxford, spending time as a visiting researcher at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and taught at the Open University and Queen Mary, London University. Her book, Laurence Sterne in France (2008) was well reviewed by the TLS and other journals, and she is one of Granta’s “New Voices” in their Emerging Writers series.

Houman Barekat is a book critic based in London. His reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator, Literary Review, the Irish Times and elsewhere. He is coeditor (with Robert Barry and David Winters) of The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online, forthcoming from O/R Books. Jennifer Breen is the author of In Her Own Write: Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction, and co-author of Romantic Literature. She edited the two ground-breaking anthologies, Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832 and Women Romantics, 1785-1832: Writing in Prose. She is also the editor of Wilfred Owen: Selected Poetry and Prose, reissued by Routledge in 2014. Isabel Galleymore’s debut pamphlet is Dazzle Ship (Worple Press, 2014). Her poems have featured widely in journals such as Poetry and Poetry London. This summer she was awarded an Eric Gregory Award. She lectures at the University of Birmingham. John Greening has published more than a dozen collections (notably To the War Poets, Carcanet, 2013), and several studies of poetry and poets. His edition of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (OUP) appeared in 2015, along with a classical music anthology, Accompanied Voices. Following the pamphlet Nebamun’s Tomb (Rack Press, 2016), he has this year published a major collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, Heath (Nine Arches) and is now working on a long poem about Sibelius. TLS reviewer and Eric Gregory judge, John Greening’s awards include the Bridport Prize and a Cholmondeley. He is RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College. www.johngreening.co.uk John Kinsella’s most recent book of poetry is Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016). His most recent book of short stories is Crow’s Breath from the Australian publisher Transit Lounge (2015). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University, Western Australia. Angela Kirby grew up in rural Lancashire, but now lives in London. The author of five books on cooking, gardening and related subjects, her poems are widely published and broadcast. Much of her work has been translated into Romanian. In 1996 and 2001 she was the B.B.C.’s Wildlife Poet of the Year. Shoestring Press published her four collections: Mr. Irresistible, 2005, Dirty Work, 2008, A Scent of Winter, 2013, and The Days After Always, New and Selected Poems, 2015. A 5th collection is under way. Erik Martiny teaches literature, art and translation to Chartes and Khâgne students at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris. His articles on contemporary art, fashion and literature have appeared in the TLS, Aesthetica, Fjords Review and Whitewall Magazine among others. His first novel The Pleasures of Queueing will appear this spring with C&R Press.

Chris McCabe is the Poetry Librarian at Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library and programmer for Poetry International. He is also a poet and writer, his most recent book being Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery (Penned in the Margins, 2016).

Niall McDevitt is the author of three collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He is also known for his psychogeographical, psychohistorical walks such as The William Blake Walk, An Arthur Rimbaud Drift, A Chaucer London Pilgrimage, The Kensington Modernists, and many others. As art-activist he has campaigned to save the Rimbaud-Verlaine house in Mornington Crescent, and against overdevelopment of sites near Blake’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields. In 2016, he performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival. He blogs at poetopography.wordpress.com Thirty-one of Jeffrey Meyers’ books have been translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. In 2012 he gave the Seymour lectures on biography at the National Libraries of Australia. He’s recently published Remembering Iris Murdoch in 2013, Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes in 2014, Robert Lowell in Love and The Mystery of the

Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville in 2016. Horatio Morpurgo helped to campaign for the establishment of a Marine Protected Area in Lyme Bay. He has written widely about the sea-bed’s recovery there since 2008. His latest book, The Paradoxal Compass, places the West Country’s relationship with the sea, and with science, in a longer historical context.

Michael Nott is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork. His first monograph, Photopoetry, 1845-2015: A Critical History is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2018.

Leonard Quart: Professor Emeritus of Cinema— CUNY and COSI; Contributing Editor, Cineaste; co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945 (5th Edition (Praeger) will be out in 2018) , and The Films of Mike Leigh (Cambridge University Press). Writer of innumerable essays and reviews of film and other subjects for magazines like Dissent, Film Quarterly, London Magazine, and Logos. Columnist for the Berkshire Eagle. Christopher Reid is the author of many books of verse, including The Song of Lunch, Nonsense, Six Bad Poets and The Curiosities. Earlier this year, the actor Robert Bathurst presented A Scattering and The Song of Lunch as a theatrical double bill under the title Love, Loss and Chianti. As the tenth anniversary of the loss of his wife Lucinda Gane approaches he has returned to elegy in ten poems addressed directly to her in Anniversay published by Enitharmon Press.

Ianthe Ruthven is a photographer specializing in architecture, interiors and landscapes. Her work has appeared in numerous books and magazines, including Architectural Digest, Art and

Antiques, The World of Interiors, Country Life and other publications in the United States, Britain and Japan. Her photographs and composite images have been shown at galleries in Britain and France. Her books include The Irish Home (1997) The Scottish House (1999) (cowritten with Malise Ruthven) Animal London (2011) and Hitler’s Atlantic Wall (2014). She lives with Malise in London. Malise Ruthven has written several books, including Torture: the Grand Conspiracy (1978)

Islam in the World (1984) Fundamentalism – the search for meaning (2004) and Encounters with Islam (2012). In addition to his concerns with religion and politics, he has a long-standing interest in human defecation. Human Waste, a full-length documentary on composting toilets he co-produced with film-maker John Blake was broadcast on Channel Four’s Equinox programme in 1990; ‘Revolution by Latrine’ a blog-essay about the lack of toilets in India published in the New York Review of Books, won him an award from the Overseas Press Club of America in April 2011.

James Simpson is a Jerwood/Arvon writing fellow and was a prizewinner in the Thomas Hardy Society’s James Gibson Memorial Poetry Competition. He has collaborated with the artist and printmaker Carolyn Trant on the artist books, Hunting the Wren and The Rhyme of

the Reddleman’s Daughter (both Parvenu Press), editions of which now reside in private and public collections nationally and internationally. ‘Heyshott Harvest’ is taken from their most recent artist book collaboration Some Light Remains.

Charles Spencer was educated at Eton College and obtained his degree in Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a reporter on NBC’s Today Show from 1986 until 1995, and is the author of four books, including Sunday Times bestseller Blenheim: Battle for Europe (shortlisted for History Book of the Year at the 2005 National Book Awards), Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier and Killers of the King.

Will Stone is a poet, essayist and literary translator. Shearsman Books have recently reissued his poetry collections in new editions and published his third The Sleepwalkers in March 2016. His translations with Arc, Menard and Hesperus include works by Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Trakl, Rilke, Nerval and Roth. Pushkin Press published his Stefan Zweig Montaigne in August 2015 and Zweig’s 1930’s essays as Messages from a Lost World in January 2016. His

Selected Poems of Georges Rodenbach will be published by Arc in 2017 and an expanded collection of the poetry of Georg Trakl by Seagull Books in 2017. Will also contributes to Poetry

Review, The TLS and Apollo magazine. Will Vigar has an unhealthy obsession with Brutalist Architecture and revels in the beauty of lost causes. He writes poetry about land, sea and skewed nostalgia and has edited collections of both poetry and comic books. He is currently working on a collection of site specific poems and planning a month long dérive of the cities of Norway. Fiercely Northern, he lives in Hampshire and i s not best pleased about it.

Eoghan Walls is an Irish poet. Educated in Wales and Ireland, he has since lived in Rwanda, Germany and Scotland. He won an Eric GregoryAward in 2006, and has been shortlisted and highly commended in many other prizes, including the Manchester Poetry Prize, The Bridport Prize and the Wigtown International Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Salt Harvest (Seren 2011) was shortlisted for the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection. Currently he lives in Lancaster with his wife and daughters, where he lectures Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Rebecca Watson is a freelance reviewer and writer. Her portfolio includes The Sunday Times,

The Telegraph, Metro, Times Literary Supplement and TES. She is an Editorial Assistant at the Financial Times and Assistant Editor at Review 31.