Mon 12 Feb - Archive Event

Phil Davenport and Hester Reeve

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Philip Davenport is a visual poet who makes poems out of shopping lists, fashion magazines, porn. His first collection Imaginary Missing People was published by the experimental press Writers Forum. His Vogue Divine series was billposted throughout Manchester in 2002. In 2004 Heart Shape Pornography series was handwritten onto hundreds of apples and exhibited at the Walker , Liverpool as part of the Biennial. In 2005, he helped curate the Bury Text Festival of poetry and text art. During this time he made a series of soundpieces from overheard conversations.

HRH is the conceptual persona of UK artist Hester Reeve. She is a performance artist who encompasses live art, philosophy, drawing and photography

Mon 12 Mar

Clare Shaw and Jean 'Binta' Breeze

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Clare Shaw was born in 1972 in Burnley, the youngest of six children, and moved to Liverpool at the age of 18 to study politics. Her years in the city were marked by frequent admissions to psychiatric wards, which motivated her to become involved in working to improve mental health services. In her work, postgraduate study, publications and activism, she has become a recognised voice on women's mental health issues. She lives in West Yorkshire , and works in a self-harm awareness training partnership with her sister. She has given many readings, and was chosen one of the Arvon / Jerwood Young Writers of 2003-04.

Jean 'Binta' Breeze was born in Jamaica in 1957. She studied at the Jamaican School of Drama with Michael Smith and Oku Onuora. A 'dub' poet, she began to write poetry in the 1970s, performing and recording first in Kingston then in London. She has worked as a director and scriptwriter for theatre, television and film. She has performed her work throughout the world, touring in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South East Asia and Africa. Her poetry collections include the books Ryddim Ravings (1988), Spring Cleaning (1992) and The Arrival Of Brighteye and Other Poems (2000). Several recordings of her work are available, including Hearsay (1994) and Riding on de Riddym (1996). She also wrote the script for the film Hallelujah Anyhow , screened at the British Film Festival in 1990. Her latest book is The Fifth Figure (2006), a sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.

Mon 23 Apr

Leslie Brody and Gary Amdahl

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite  

Gary Amdahl is the author of the short story collection Visigoth. He has been published in "The Santa Monica Review", "The Quarterly", "Fiction", "The Nation", and "The Gettysburg Review". He won a Pushcart Prize for Narrow Road to the Deep North. Gary Amdahl has also published a novella called I am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster: A Story of Chicago , and has co-written a book of essays with Leslie Brody A Motel of the Mind. Gary Amdahl lives in Redlands, California.

Leslie Brody, assistant professor of English at the University of Redlands, is among a select group of creative writers chosen for the Sundance Writers' Fellowship Program. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Red Star Sister: Between Madness and Utopia and has written a number of plays, screenplays and opera librettos. She has recently been the writer in residence at the University of Redlands in California where she has been writing a book of creative non-fiction about counterculture artists, literary rebels and dissident journalists.

Mon 30 April

Alec Finlay and Tom Raworth

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Alec Finlay is an artist, poet and publisher. He lives and works in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Alec has worked as an artist and publisher in residence at BALTIC: the Centre for Contemporary Art ( Gateshead ) 20020 - 03 and has worked on artist residences with Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Creative Partnerships in the Durham region. Alec has also lectured widely on such subjects as books, publishing, collaborations and public art and co-ordinates the renga platform, a shared writing project, and a new collaborative piece entitled Sewing Circle.

  
Tom Raworth is a prolific poet and has a career that includes being the editor of Outburst magazine, founder of the Goliard Press, and an artist whose shows have been seen in galleries in Europe and America: he has over forty books and pamphlets published since 1966. Born in London, he has travelled widely and lived in both the USA and Mexico before returning to Britain, settling in Cambridge, where he has been Poet in Residence to Kings College, Cambridge; he has also received the Alice Hunt Bartlett prize, the Cholmondeley Award, and Arts Council funding for his writing. His Collected Poems were published by Carcanet in 2003.

Mon 21 May

Jane Griffiths and David Almond

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, but brought up in Holland. After reading English at Oxford , where her poem The House won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a bookbinder in London and Norfolk . She has since returned to Oxford, where she recently completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton, and is now working as an editor on the Oxford English Dictionary. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1996.

David Almond is twice winner of the Whitbread Children's Book Award. His first novel, Skellig, won the Whitbread Children's Award and the Carnegie Medal. His second, Kit's Wilderness won the Smarties Award Silver Medal, was Highly Commended for the Carnegie Medal, and shortlisted for the Guardian Award. The Fire Eaters won the Whitbread, the Smarties Gold Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Clay is the latest of his ten books. David is widely regarded as one of the most exciting and innovative children's authors writing today.

ARCHIVE POETRY AND PROSE EVENTS

Mon 20 Feb

Bernardine Evaristo & Maggie Gee

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite

Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father. The fourth of eight siblings, she was raised in Woolwich, South London, and originally trained as an actress and worked in theatre.  She is the author of two critically-acclaimed novels-in-verse: Lara (1997), which traces the roots of a mixed-race English-Nigerian-Brazilian-Irish family over 150 years, three continents and seven generations; and The Emperor's Babe (2001), the ground-breaking tragi-comic story of Zuleika, a girl of Sudanese parents, who grows up in Roman London 1800 years ago and who has an affair with the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus.  Her novel-with-verse, Soul Tourists (2005), is about a car journey across Europe starring a mismatched couple, Stanley and Jessie. Bernardine has also written for theatre, radio, print media and for a multi-media collaboration Cityscapes with saxophonist Andy Sheppard and pianist Joanna MacGregor for the City of London Festival in 2003.  She has undertaken over 50 international writers' tours since 1997, ranging from one-night readings to three-month teaching residencies. She has been a Visiting Professor at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York, Writer-in-Residence at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, and Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She also represented Britain, with the novelist Glenn Patterson, on Literaturexpress Europa 2000, which took 105 European writers through 11 European countries over six weeks by train, travelling from Portugal to Berlin via Belgium, the Baltics and Russia.  She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004.

Novelist Maggie Gee was born in Poole, Dorset, in 1948 and educated at state schools and Somerville College, Oxford where she completed two degrees in English. After working in publishing as an editor, she took a research job at Wolverhampton Polytechnic where she completed a PhD.  Her first published novel was Dying, in Other Words (1981), an experimental black comedy in which a supposedly dead woman triumphantly rewrites the story of her own death.  In 1982, Maggie was selected as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' by the Book Marketing Council and became Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia.  The Burning Book (1983) intercuts the story of a British family whose lives are torn apart by world wars with sections about the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Light Years (1985), structured in 12 sections and 52 chapters to represent a year, places the quarrels of two tiny human lovers in the bigger frame of nature, the planets and the stars. Grace (1989) implicates the British secret state in its fictional parallel to the unsolved real-life murder of an anti-nuclear activist, Hilda Murrell. Where Are The Snows (1991) begins like an erotic saga as two lovers abandon their teenage children to go on a perpetual holiday, but systematically proves you cannot buy the world, separate sex and reproduction, and live for ever. Lost Children (1994) describes a London full of thousands of homeless children. The Ice People (1998) is a dystopia with a biracial hero, set in a new ice age in 2050: the ice forces people from the rich north to try to migrate south, where they are unwelcome. Her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, tackles the issue of racism in Britain. The Flood (2004), is again a dystopia, but this time with a contemporary urban setting, and explores the effects of a modern-day flood on a city and its inhabitants. Her most recent novel is My Cleaner (2005).  Maggie Gee is the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and a Teaching Fellow at Sussex University.

Mon 6 Mar - ARCHIVE EVENT

Jackie Kay & Ali Smith

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father.  She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University where she read English.

The experience of being adopted by, and growing up with, a white family inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers (1991).  The poems deal with an adopted child’s search for a cultural identity and are told through three different voices: an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter.  The collection won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and a commendation by the Forward Poetry Prize judges in 1992.  The poems in Other Lovers (1993) explore the role and power of language. Inspired and influenced by the history of Afro-Caribbean people, the story of a search for identity grounded in the experience of slavery.  The collection includes a sequence of poems about the Blues singer Bessie Smith.  Off Colour (1998) explores themes of sickness, health and disease through personal experience and metaphor.  Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, and she has written widely for stage and television.

Her first novel, Trumpet, published in 1998, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.  Inspired by the life of musician Billy Tipton, the novel tells the story of Scottish jazz trumpeter Joss Moody, whose death revealed that he was, in fact, a woman.  Kay develops the narrative through the voices of Moody’s wife, his adopted son and a journalist from a tabloid newspaper.  Her recent book, Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002), is a collection of short stories, and she has also published a novel for children, Strawgirl (2002).  Her latest collection of poetry is Life Mask (2005).

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. Her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award.

Her first novel , Like, was published to critical acclaim in 1997. Set in Scotland and Cambridge , the book tells the story of an enduring childhood friendship. A second collection of short stories, Other Stories and Other Stories , was published in 1999. Her second novel, Hotel World (2001), won the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. It was also shortlisted for both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Booker Prize for Fiction. Set during the course of one night, the narrative follows the adventures of five different characters, one of whom is the ghost of a chambermaid killed in a bizarre accident. Her most recent collection of short stories is The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003) and her latest novel, The Accidental (2004) won the Whitbread best novel in January 2006.

Mon 13 Mar - ARCHIVE EVENT

Zoe Lambert, Maria Roberts & Emma Unsworth

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite

Three short story writers featured in Bracket, edited by Ra Page.  The latest in Comma’s acclaimed series of short story anthologies, Bracket brings together 20 of the country’s most promising, previously unpublished writers.  From the cliffs of Flamborough Head to high rise, inner city madness; from lost loves to the last days of civilisation - the settings and scenarios in these stories captivate and unsettle in equal measure, all the time striving for that most unlikely modern thing, intimacy.

Mon 24 Apr- ARCHIVE EVENT

Simon Armitage & Allen Fisher

The Octagon's Bill Naughton Studio Theatre

Simon Armitage was born in 1963 and lives in West Yorkshire.  He has published nine volumes of poetry including Killing Time (1999, Faber & Faber) and Selected Poems (2001, Faber & Faber).  His most recent collections are The Universal Home Doctor and Travelling Songs, both published by Faber & Faber in 2002.  He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award. His first novel, Little Green Man, was published by Penguin in 2001. His second novel, The White Stuff, was published in 2004.

He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays, including Mister Heracles, a version of the Euripides play The Madness of Heracles.  His recent dramatisation of The Odyssey, commissioned by the BBC, was broadcast on Radio 4 in 2004 and is available through BBC Worldwide.  He received an Ivor Novello Award for his song-lyrics in the Channel 4 film Feltham Sings, which also won a BAFTA.

Simon has taught at the University of Leeds and the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and currently teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University. With Robert Crawford he edited The Penguin Anthology of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945.  Other anthologies include Short and Sweet – 101 Very Short Poems, and a selection of Ted Hughes’ poetry, both published by Faber & Faber.  The Shout, a book of new and selected poems, will be published in the US in 2005 by Harcourt.  He is currently working on a translation of the Middle English classic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Allen Fisher was born in 1944, and has been involved in performance writing since 1962.  A painter, publisher, editor and art historian, he has produced one hundred and twenty-eight chapbooks and books of poetry, graphics and art documentation.  He currently edits Spanner, lives in Hereford and London and is Head of Art at the University of Surrey Roehampton.  He has exhibited paintings in many shows, including a one-man show at York in 1993 and two-man retrospective in Hereford 1994, and examples of his work are in the Tate Gallery collection, The King's College archive and the Living Museum, Iceland.  He continues to perform and write and paint.  The work Gravity as a consequence of shape, a long work published in many smaller books and booklets, started in 1982, is scheduled for completion in 2005.

Mon 8 May, 7.30pm - ARCHIVE EVENT

Sophie Hannah & Scott Thurston

In the Octagon's Bill Naughton Studio Theatre (BNT)

Sophie Hannah is a bestselling poet, a novelist and a children’s writer who regularly performs her work to live audiences both nationwide and abroad.  She has won awards for her short stories and for her poetry, including first prize in the 2004 Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition.  In June 2004, she was chosen for the Next Generation poetry promotion as one of the best twenty poets to emerge in the last ten years and Penguin will shortly be publishing her Selected Poems. In 2006, Hodder & Stoughton will publish Sophie’s first psychological crime novel, Little Face, and her first collection of short stories, We All Say What We Want, will be published by Sort Of Books in 2007.

She has won several awards for her poetry, which is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her work has also been published in America, Germany and Australia.

Scott Thurston began writing in the poetry scene situated around Gilbert Adair's Sub-Voicive Poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing's New River Project workshops in London in the late eighties. In 1995 he moved to Poland where he taught English as a foreign language. He returned to the UK in 1997 and completed a Ph.D. on Linguistically Innovative Poetry. He lectures in English and Creative Writing at The University of Salford, lives in Liverpool and is editor of The Radiator , a journal of contemporary poetics. His first full-length collection, Hold , has just been published by Shearsman Books.

Mon 30 Oct - ARCHIVE EVENT

Ian Duhig & Neil Rollinson

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite

Ian Duhig (born 1954) has written four books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Lammas Hireling (2003), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Best Collection Prize.  Earlier collections are The Bradford Count (1991), The Mersey Goldfish (1995) and Nominies (1998).  He has previously won an Arts Council Writers and Cholmondeley Award, the Forward Best Poem Prize in 2001 and the British Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition twice.  Since working for 15 years with homeless people, he has held fellowships at Lancaster, Leeds, Durham and Newcastle Universities, was the Northern Arts Literary Fellow in 2000 and the 2003 International Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.

Neil Rollinson was born in Yorkshire in 1960 and studied Fine Art at Newcastle before dropping out and moving to London.  After travelling around India and the Far East, he returned to England to concentrate on writing - he made his debut with A Spillage Of Mercury in 1996.  Winner of the National Poetry Competition in 1997, he published his second collection, Spanish Fly, in 2001; both are Poetry Book Society recommendations.

He is currently working with 57 Productions developing a series of virtual online creative writing workshops, including Poetry Jukebox, which can be found at www.poetryjukebox.com.  He is also editor of the internet literature magazine Boomerang.

Mon 6 Nov - ARCHIVE EVENT

David Constantine & Roddy Lumsden

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Freelance writer, poet and translator David Constantine was born in Salford in 1944, lives in Oxford and is a Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford.  His poetry books include Watching For Dolphins (1983), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, Selected Poems (1991), Caspar Hauser (1994), The Pelt Of Wasps (1998) and Something For The Ghosts (2002).  His translations include Friedrich Hölderlin's Selected Poems (1990, revised 1996), winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize.  He is currently working on a translation of Goethe's Faust for Penguin Classics.  His novel Davies (1985) won the Southern Arts Literature Prize and his non-fiction book, Early Greek Travellers And The Hellenic Ideal (1984) won the 1986 Runciman Award.  His Collected Poems was published in 2004, and Under The Dam, a collection of short stories, was published in 2005 by Comma Press.

Born in St Andrews, Scotland in 1966, Roddy Lumsden now lives in Bristol where he is a freelance writer and puzzle compiler.  A first book Yeah Yeah Yeah was shortlisted for several prizes.  As poet-in-residence to the music industry in 1999, he co-wrote The Message, a book on poetry and popular music.  A second collection The Book Of Love was a PBS Choice and shortlisted for the 2000 TS Eliot Prize and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.  He co-edited Anvil New Poets 3 and tutors for The Poetry School.  His third collection Roddy Lumsden Is Dead was published in 2001, after which he travelled to Canada on an Arts Council International Fellowship.  He recently completed a residency at the St Andrews Bay spa and golf resort with a new pamphlet The Bubble Bride.  Mischief Night: New And Selected Poems was published in 2004, as was Vitamin Q, a book of trivia and reference - the accompanying website is at www.vitaminq.blogspot.com

Mon 13 Nov - ARCHIVE EVENT

Andrew Martin

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Andrew Martin, a former Spectator Young Writer of the Year, grew up in Yorkshire.  After qualifying as a barrister he became a freelance journalist in which capacity he has tended to write about the North, class, trains, seaside towns and eccentric individuals.  He has also learned to drive steam locomotives, albeit under very close supervision.  He has written for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and Granta, among many other publications, and his weekly column appears in the New Statesman.  His highly acclaimed first novel, Bilton, was described as “enormously funny, genuinely moving and even a little scary”, and was followed by The Bobby Dazzlers, which Tim Lott hailed as “truly unusual - a comic novel that actually makes you laugh”.  In praise of his first novel in the Jim Stringer series, The Necropolis Railway, the Evening Standard said “the age of steam has rarely been better evoked”, while the Mirror described the book as “a brilliant murder mystery”.  The other novels in the series are The Blackpool Highflyer (2004) and The Lost Luggage Porter (2006).  A review by Peter Gutteridge comments, “Martin takes his time evoking the period, the people and the age of steam railway without losing the momentum of the mystery. He also wears his research lightly, though he’s clearly done a lot of it.”

Mon 4 Dec - ARCHIVE EVENT

Melvin Burgess

Octagon Theatre Hospitality Suite 

Melvin Burgess, born in 1954, was brought up in Sussex and says he did poorly at school.  After leaving school, Melvin moved to Bristol where he worked at occasional jobs, mainly in the building industry, and was often unemployed.  He wrote his first book when he was twenty and wrote on and off for the next fifteen years before his novel The Cry Of The Wolf was accepted for publication in 1990 and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.  Described by Maureen Owen, writing in The Times, as “a new and powerful talent”, Melvin is now regarded as one of the rising stars of contemporary children's literature.  His books are never easy; they deal with difficult subjects such as homelessness, drugs, hunting, witchcraft and child abuse.  In 1997, Junk won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. Bloodtide and Bloodsong are updated Norse myths, and Doing It explores the problems of teenagers and drugs. Sara’s Face, a psychological thriller and his most recent novel, has just been released.   Melvin continues to write challenging novels for young adults as well as extraordinarily imaginative fiction for younger readers.