Tuesday 14 November 2017

Michael Marks Awards Shortlisting

AWARD NEWS 

V. Press is very very delighted to have been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Publishers' Award.

The award is a highlight of the poetry pamphlet publishing calendar and runs from July to July.  The pamphlets that V. Press had in for this year are: Alex Reed's A Career in Accompaniment, Nina Lewis' Fragile Houses, David Clarke's Scare Stories and Stephen Daniels' Tell Mistakes I Love Them.

It's been a delight to publish these pamphlets and V. Press is very very proud of all its authors - the press is its writers, readers and all those involved with it, including our fabulous poetry covers from V. Press designer Ruth Stacey.

The Awards will be announced at a dinner at the British Library on Tuesday, 12 December, where Sarah Leavesley will be giving a three minute presentation about the V. Press 2016/17 pamphlet list.

Other presses shortlisted are Mariscat Press, The Poetry Business/Smith Doorstep and Rack Press. The awards are run by The Wordsworth Trust and The British Library, with the generous support of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust, in association with the TLS and Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS), in Washington DC and in Nafplio Greece. More about this year's shortlisted presses and individual pamphlets can be found here.

The judges’ comments include: "The V. Press offering of four remarkably diverse pamphlets included a mix of established and new writers. We fell in love in particular with Alex Reed's pamphlet ‘A Career in Accompaniment’ about looking after his wife - quiet poems, carefully crafted, with enormous emotional heft and dignity. "

To celebrate this shortlisting, all four V. Press pamphlets from this 2016/2017 are available below with £1.50 off their usual price. [This offer is for U.K. delivery only and runs until the end of 2017, and through the links below only.]


Tell Mistakes I Love Them exposes social nerves and pokes at the wounds with poems that are very vulnerable and very poignant.




Scare Stories is a sequence of poems that is very unusual and very unsettling.







Fragile Houses is very authentic and very fervent.The pamphlet includes a photographic sequence from S.A. Leavesley that is directly inspired by the poems’ vivid mix of fragility and sharpness.






A Career in Accompaniment is a pamphlet of love, loss and surprising lightness. Based on Alex Reed’s personal experiences, these poems witness what it is like to care for a lover with severe illness. This poetry of “fragile places” is very intimate yet very universal.






FORTHCOMING TITLES

V. Press finishes 2017 with publication of  Claire Walker's second V. Press pamphlet Somewhere Between Rose and Black at the start of December.

2017 has been our busiest year yet, with four poetry pamphlets, three full collections and two fiction pamphlets.

The first V. Press poetry pamphlet for 2018 is How to Parallel Park by James Davey, followed by Jenna Plewes' Against the Pull of Time in summer 2018.

Also for 2018, V. Press has Unable Mother, a debut poetry collection from Helen Calcutt, a poetry collection from Brenda Read-Brown, a flash fiction novella  that draws on the techniques of prose poetry by Michael Loveday and a flash pamphlet from Tino Prinzi.

But the press will be looking for new poetry titles for later in 2018...

SUBMISSIONS NEWS

V. Press managing director and editor Sarah Leavesley was pleased to take part in a short interview with Jim Harrington about the press at Six Questions For... (The questions and answers here.)

Although titles for the start of 2018 have been scheduled,  V. Press is hoping to re-open a general poetry submissions window early next year. The press will be looking for poetry titles for the second half of 2018 and going into 2019.

For more information about new titles and submission windows, please follow V. Press on twitter at @vpresspoetry and sign up for the press newsletters (below or the side-bar on the right-hand side of the webpage).


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