Notes on Contributors

Raficq Abdulla is a writer and broadcaster on a number of topics including Art, Shari’ah law, Islam, identity, poetry and spirituality & the sacred. He has sat on the boards of the Poetry Society, of Planet Poetry and of English PEN where he was Acting President in 2013/14. He now sits on the editorial Board of the translators’ journal, In Other Words. He is a member of the Translation Committee of English PEN. Peter Ainsworth is a former politician. Currently Chair of the U.K. Big Lottery Fund and the Churches Conservation Trust, and a board member of the Environment Agency, he has written regularly for Resurgence. His verse has been published and broadcast and his writing for The London Magazine includes the sonnet ‘Assonance’ and ‘The Grange’ - a ghost story. Michael Amherst is the author of Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth and Desire, forthcoming with Repeater Books in February, 2018. His short fiction has appeared in publications including The White Review and Contrappasso and been longlisted for BBC Opening Lines and Bath Short Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, New Statesman and Attitude, among others. He is a recipient of an award from Arts Council England and is working on a novel as part of a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. 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. Conor Carville was born in Armagh City. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University, he is currently Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Reading. His critical work on cultural theory and Irish writing, The Ends of Ireland: Criticism, History, Subjectivity, was published in 2012. In 2007 he won the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry. He lives in London with his wife and daughter. Harm’s Way is his debut collection of poems and is published by the Dedalus Press in February 2013. Sally Emerson is the award-winning author of novels including Heat, Separation and Second Sight and an anthologist of poetry and prose. She lives in London. Her website is www.sallyemerson.com Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, editor, and critic. She was born in London and studied at the universities of St Andrews and York. She has taught in France and Germany, worked in publishing, and was recently a sound technician, translator, and interpreter for StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews. Her writing has appeared in the TLS, Eborakon, New Welsh Review, The Scores, Time Present, Tears in the Fence, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is Reviews Editor for The Compass. Stephanie de Giorgio’s fiction piece, Ode to Spectacles (Three Inches Thick), is her first short story. She is a London-based writer who trained as an actor at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York. Previous writing includes a feature length music video for the album Night Thoughts, exhibited by Suede at their shows across Europe and in London at the Roundhouse and Barbican. She has also written and co-directed a short film, Witch, that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and the London Independent Film Festival. Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. The Poetry Society’s only ever official Public Art Poet, she has published three collections of poetry: Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), a book of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt) and two novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press). Her third novel will be published by Cinnamon in 2017. Art critic for many years on The Independent and The New Statesman, her Adventures in Art, a compendium of essays on art, is published by Other Criteria. She was recently invited to record her poems for the National Poetry Archive. com. www.suehubbard.

Andrew Lambirth is a writer about art who also writes poetry and makes collages. Besides contributing to a range of publications including The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian and RA Magazine, he was art critic for The Spectator from 2002 until 2014, and has collected his reviews in a paperback entitled A is a Critic. Among his recent books are monographs on the artists David Inshaw, Eileen Gray and William Gear. He lives in Suffolk surrounded by pictures. Alistair Lexden is a Conservative peer and historian. His recent publications include A Gift from the Churchills: The Primrose League 1883-2004 and The Carlton Club 1832-2007. In a forthcoming lecture to mark the 150th anniversary Stanley Baldwin’s birth, he will reassess the career of an extremely well-read prime minister who dominated inter-war British politics; the lecture will be broadcast on the BBC Parliament Channel in April. Full details of his historical work and of his contributions to the Lords can be found on his website,htpp://www. alistairlexden.org.uk.

Jeffrey Meyers has 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. Katrina Naomi’s poetry has appeared in The TLS, Poetry London and The Poetry Review, and on Radio 4. She is travelling to Japan in autumn 2017, following an Arts Council/British Council award. The Way the Crocodile Taught Me was published by Seren (2016). Katrina was writer-in-residence at the Arnolfini in 2016. Previous publications include: Hooligans, (Rack Press), The Girl with the Cactus Handshake (Templar Poetry), shortlisted for the London New Writers Award, Charlotte Brönte’s Corset (Brönte Society), and Lunch at the El

ephant and Castle (Templar Poetry), which won the Templar Pamphlet Competition. Katrina holds a PhD from Goldsmiths. She is a critic and tutor. http://www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

Robert Perkins (born Boston, 1949) is an American artist, filmmaker and writer. Perkins was educated at Harvard University and Bennington College. For fifteen years, Perkins produced independent films for PBS in the US and Channel 4 in the UK, travelling to wild and remote corners of the world. Aside from his films, Perkins is also known for The Written Image, an ongoing series of personal collaborations with poets, which he embarked upon in the 1970s. The series has been created in collaboration with renowned poets including Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Octavio Paz. Perkins’s work has been shown in exhibitions internationally, including the 2014 Ledbury Poetry Festival and most recently at Benjamin Spademan Rare Books in London. www.robertfperkins.com

Fiona Pitt-Kethley is the author of more than 20 books of prose or poetry published by Chatto and WIndus, Abacus, Peter Owen, Sinclair-Stevenson, Arcadia Books and smaller presses. She has also published many articles in the Independent, the Guardian, the Times, the

Telegraph, London Review of Books and other magazines and newspapers. She lives in Spain. Dan Powell is a prize-winning author of short fiction whose work has appeared in the pages of Being Dad, The Lonely Voice, Unthology and Best British Short Stories. His debut collection, Looking Out Of Broken Windows, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize and longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Prize. He is currently working on a second story collection and a debut novel, is a First Story writer-in-residence, and is completing his PhD in Creative Writing at University of Leicester. He procrastinates at danpowellfiction.com and on Twitter as @danpowfiction.

Tony Roberts’s fourth book of poems, Drawndark, appeared in 2014. He is also the author of an essay collection, The Taste in My Mind (2015), and the editor of Poetry in the Blood (2014), all from Shoestring Press. Concerning Roberts’s poetry, Al Alvarez wrote of ‘an authentic adult voice, tender, ironic, relaxed and highly educated’. Reviewing his prose, John Forth found ‘a detailed map of the age … condensed to appear as table talk’.

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’s 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; including the British Library (Modern British Special Collections), Yale University Library, Louisiana State University (LSU Libraries) and the University of Georgia (Main Library). In 2011 The Untenanted Room was published as an Agenda Editions, the second movement of a longer poem of that name.

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. Tara Stubbs is Associate Professor in English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of a range of publications on modernist poetry and fiction, with a focus on Irish and American literature, and has a particular interest in transatlantic literature and culture. Her first monograph was entitled American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910–1955: the politics of enchantment (MUP, 2013), and she is currently working on a book-length study of the Irish sonnet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. M. Lock Swingen was born and raised in North Dakota. He is the creative director of the videography company Twin Tandem Studios. He is also a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books and the Harvard Review. Simon Tait is a freelance journalist, writer and editor. He is a former commissioning editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine and arts correspondent of The Times and has contributed features to most national newspapers. He is co-editor of the fortnightly Arts Industry magazine. He is the author of a biography of the painter Philip Sutton among other books, and was President of the Critics’ Circle 2013-15. Ella Windsor has contributed to various publications including Monocle Magazine, Vogue, The Ecologist and The Daily Telegraph. She writes about culture, the arts and arts education, particularly in South America where she lived for several years. She is Director of Arts and Travel for Branding Latin America Group, a London-based platform for the region. She is also Board Director of Toucan Ventures, supporting the growth of creative entrepreneurs, and the Playing for Change Foundation, a global music education nonprofit organisation. She graduated from Brown and Oxford universities with degrees in Comparative Literature and Social Anthropology.

Short Fiction by Dan Powell and Stephanie di Giorgio Featuring: Will Stone on the Cathedral of Soissons Tara Stubbs on T. S. Eliot Sally Emerson on My London Tony Roberts on Robert Lowell Ella Windsor on Nicolás García Uriburu and Land Art M. Lock Swingen on Remembering Derek Walcott Grey Gowrie on Heathcote Williams Alistair Lexden on Lord Northcote and his diaries Reviews by Andrew Lambirth, Sue Hubbard, Will Stone, Simon Tait, Jeffrey Meyers, Houman Barekat, Conor Carville and Matthew Scott