Andrew Oldham

Ambit 197

Andrew Oldham is in the latest edition of Ambit, issue 197, with two poems, The Little Red House and These Walls. Other poets featured in Ambit 197 are Fred Voss, Anthony Suter, Robert Cole and Robert Sward to name a few with cover art by Chris Pig.

Ambit was started in 1959 by Martin Bax. Other editors include Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Foreman, Henry Graham and Geoff Nicholson.

Ambit is published in the UK and read internationally. It’s available through subscription and in selected bookshops and libraries worldwide.

‘Ambit is a surreptitious peek inside a private world. Without it such vital sparks of inspiration could well be lost for ever.’ – RALPH STEADMAN

You can buy Ambit 197 featuring Andrew Oldham at http://ambitmagazine.co.uk/Buy.htm or better still take out a subscription at http://ambitmagazine.co.uk/Subscribe.htm

Ambit has a Facebook Group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=12225930214

Tags: Ambit 197, Andrew Oldham, Fred Voss, Robert Cole

New Appointment

Andrew has been appointed as the first Director for http://www.incwriters.co.uk. Though Andrew founded Incwriters with Ian Parks, William Park and Bixby Monk back in 2004, he has taken a backseat since 2007 and only worked in a limited role as Administrator. He has now been brought back on board to oversee the change in the website, and to bring back the one stop shop ethos the original website had. Andrew says, ‘I am looking forward to showing the site at it’s best, to create a website devoted to publishing and reading. The new website will allow publishers and readers to register and contribute, those just passing through can comment too. It has everything for everybody’.

The new website is already filling up with posts from books coming out in coming months from publishers, to events, opportunities and recordings from dead and living poets. It also heralds the launch of two new awards to sit side by side with the OCL(M) Award, these are The Milner Place Prize for Poetry and The Incwriters Prose Prize.

The Director’s post allows faster turnaround, faster communication and a greater presence in the industry.

Tags: Incwriters, New Job

T.F. Griffin Audio Recording July 2009

Another poet, another recording and a million miles away from the opinions of Milner Place. T.F. Griffin is a poet who believes that every poetic line should be able to stand alone. These principals came across the recording in Leeds and Ian Parks, Ed Reiss and I were joined by Jules Smith (TLS Critic) and Pam Scobie. It was a busy afternoon, and we did cover vast sections of Griffin’s life from his correspondence with Ted Hughes to his work with Larkin. T.F. Griffin comes from the Hull Poets movement, a tempestuous time that saw the far left clash with the literary elite, and saw poetry at it’s political height. T.F. Griffin went against this grain to capture poetic images that owe more to Yeats and Hughes then campus sit ins, three day week and the growing crowd of bored, angry young men.

I hope in the next few weeks to put up some audio excerpts from this recording and Milner Place’s recording, probably under the Oldham Sessions banner – let me know if you want to hear them!

In the above image are left to right, at the back, Andrew Oldham and Ed Reiss, and at the front, Ian Parks and T.F. Griffin.

Tags: Ed Reiss, Ian Parks, Jules Smith, Oldham Recordings, Oldham Sessions, T.F. Griffin

Milner Place Audio Recording February and June 2009

I have been busy recently recording a number of Northern based poets. Rather than just recording their poems, I have, with the help of Ian Parks and Ed Reiss, been delving a little deeper. This has allowed us not only just to capture the poems, discuss form, influences etc but look at the stories behind the poetry. These recordings have often caught the funny and sad tales behind the poet’s life, and rather than romanticise the world of poets, show that poets are just normal people and have to cope with the same chaos we all have to cope with.

It was a delight to record Milner in February and June of 2009 and get an oversight of his life. He was frank, honest and shared many of his old and new poems with us.  I do agree with many of things Milner has said in these two recordings. One of these things I want to pass on is what Milner said in the first recording, ‘I am not a poet, I just write poetry’. I wish a lot of new and established poets would take this on board rather than believing they have to buy into a lifestyle, the life of a tortured poet, the garret and the tempetuous relationships that they believe dog the life of poets. This is just life. Good poets note this. Bad poets buy into it. Milner Place is a man who writes fantastic poetry and it was an honour to record him and bloody good fun.

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Ed Reiss, Ian Parks, Milner Place, Oldham Recordings

Incorporating Writing Issue 6 Vol 3: AGE

www.incorporatingwriting.co.uk Issue 6 Vol 3: AGE

‘It comes to us all!’ is often mumbled in supermarkets by the elderly from their motor scooter seconds after they have mowed you down. Flat, despondent and with a tyre track on your stomach it is easy to consider your own mortality or note that no one ever cleans under the units in supermarkets. But don’t worry, the team at Incorporating Writing are vibrant, have new hips, and clean in places that weekend staff in supermarkets never get to. We have bumbled out into the high street of publishing to explore Age. We look at the growing revolution in publishing with Katya Shipster, we stop off at the immoveable feast that is academia with James Methven. We let Tom Chivers free on his skateboard and Christine Brandel tackles the fact that growing old does happen over night. New columnist, Sofie Fowler, revels in being young. In our editorial, Andrew Oldham, realises those childhood dreams where never as good as you thought they were. In our articles, Faith Roswell tackles Coming of Age and Rebecca Richards wonders whether the Internet as it grows old will descend into crisis or senior moments. We are fortunate to exhibit a series of images from Wondrous by Michelle Sank. As usual we are chock full of reviews, news and opportunities. All free, all critical.

Incorporating Writing has now set up a brand new Facebook group at: http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5542923935&ref=ts. You can join for free and have another way of keeping in touch, or subscribe today through the site and get free news from Incwriters.

You can now follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Incorp_Editors

Help spread the word and forward this news to everyone you know. Incorporating Writing (ISSN 1743-0380) is an imprint of Incwriters, back issues are archived at www.incwriters.co.uk/magazines.htm

Tags: Andrew Oldham, Incorporating Writing, Katya Shipster, Tom Chivers

The Turing Test wins the 2009 Edge Hill Short Story Prize

About time! At last an SF book claims a literary prize. Showing that good writing is good writing. This is a great result for fans of SF. I am a big supporter of ‘The Turing Test’ and know that Chris is a great teller of stories. I have been a subscriber to Interzone for many years and Chris’s work was often the highlight of an edition. Interzone knew they were onto a winner with Chris and devoted an issue to him, Interzone 218! So, to those of us in the SF world it comes as no surprise that Chris has won this award. It’s about time SF was recognised by such awards, roll on the Booker with SF winners!

Cult science fiction writer Chris Beckett has won this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize – the UK’s only award for a short story collection by a single author.  The judges chose his book The Turing Test, with its tales of robots, alien planets, genetic manipulation and virtual reality over collections by Anne Enright, Shena Mackay, Ali Smith and Gerard Donovan. 

Chris was presented with the £5,000 prize and a specially commissioned painting by Liverpool artist, Pete Clarke, at a ceremony held by Edge Hill University on Saturday evening, 4 July, at the Bluecoat centre in Liverpool. He was also awarded the £1,000 Readers’ Prize.  Anne Enright won the second prize, worth £1,000, for her collection Yesterday’s Weather published by Vintage.

This year’s judges were James Walton, journalist and chair of BBC Radio 4′s The Write Stuff; author and 2008 winnerClaire Keegan and Mark Flinn, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Edge Hill University.

James Walton commented:

‘I suspect Chris Beckett winning the Edge Hill Prize will be seen as a surprise in the world of books. In fact, though, it was also a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand. Yet, once the judging process started, it soon became clear that The Turing Test was the book that we’d all been impressed by, and enjoyed, the most – and one by one we admitted it. 

This was a very strong shortlist, including one Booker Prize winner in Anne Enright, and two authors who’ve been Booker shortlisted in Ali Smith and Shena Mackay. Even so, it was Beckett who seemed to us to have written the most imaginative and endlessly inventive stories, fizzing with ideas and complete with strong characters and big contemporary themes. We also appreciated the sheer zest of his story-telling and the obvious pleasure he had taken in creating his fiction.’   

The Edge Hill Short Story Prize was launched by the university three years ago and is co-sponsored by Blackwell bookshop.

 Ailsa Cox, Reader in Creative Writing and English commented:

‘This is a double for Chris Beckett.  He not only wins the first prize but also the Readers’ Prize, voted for by local reading groups and MA Creative Writing Students.  They also responded strongly to the powerful Irish voices in Gerard Donovan’s work.  Once again the prize celebrates the enormous appeal and vitality of the short story, whether it’s the black humour of Anne Enright’s Yesterday’s Weather or the postmodern playfulness in Ali Smith’s The First Person.  So far as I’m concerned, each of these collections is a winner and I’m glad that I wasn’t the one who had to choose between them.’

The phrase ‘The Turing Test’ refers to a proposal made by Alan Turing in 1950 as a way of dealing with the question of whether machines can think.

THE TURING TEST

Fourteen stories featuring, among other things, robots, alien planets, genetic manipulation and virtual reality, but which focus on individuals rather than technology, and deal with love and loneliness, authenticity and illusion, and what it really means to be human.  Chris Beckett‘s first story was published in Interzone in 1990, and his stories have since appeared in Britain, the US and Russia.  His novel The Holy Machine was published in 2004 by Wildside Press, and his second novel, Marcher by Leisure Books in 2008.  He lives in Cambridge with his wife and three children and lectures in social work. www.elasticpress.com

‘A committed, serious writer of science fiction – subtle and adventurous in equal measure… he should already be on the radar of anyone who professes concern for science fiction as a literary form.’                                

Alastair Reynolds, author of the Revelation Space series

‘Aficionados of the genre will know Beckett for his intellectually rigorous and entertaining short fiction, and this outstanding collection should bring him to the attention of a wider audience.  His preoccupation is with identity and self-perception… He’s good at delineating the psychology of the outsider, and brilliant at depicting artificial intelligence and humanity’s relation to it.’                                                          

Eric Brown, The Guardian

Tags: Chris Beckett, Edgehill Short Story Prize, Interzone, The Turing Test