Bumper crop of pamphlets for the Emma Press

* Publisher selects 12 manuscripts from their call for submissions last year
* Selection includes 9 poetry pamphlets, 2 short story collections and 1 essay

The Emma Press has announced the pamphlets chosen from their call for submissions last year. Editors Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright selected twelve manuscripts, all to be published in 2017. The call for submissions ran from October to December in 2015 and resulted in over 100 applications.

The new pamphlet authors are: Andrew Wynn Owen, Emma Simon, Jack Nicholls, Leanne Radojkovich, Jan Carson, Padraig Regan, Zosia Kuczyńska, Carol Rumens, Rakhshan Rizwan, Simon Turner, Julia Bird and Malachi O’Doherty.

Publisher Emma Wright said: ‘The response to our call for submissions was incredibly high, which I think is a sign that we’re developing a reputation as a committed pamphlet publisher. We ended up picking manuscripts which we absolutely couldn’t bear not to publish and I can’t wait to share them all with readers next year.’

The titles include illustrated poetry pamphlets from Oxford poet Andrew Wynn Owen (The Dragon and the Bomb, publishing 12/01/17), Manchester poet Jack Nicholls (Meat Songs, publishing 16/03/17), Belfast poet Padraig Regan (Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real, publishing 08/06/17), Bangor poet Carol Rumens (Bezdelki, publishing 06/07/17) and Leamington poet Simon Turner (Birmingham Jazz Incarnation, publishing 14/09/17), as well as standard poetry pamphlets from London poet Emma Simon, Nottingham poet Zosia Kuczyńska and Utrecht poet Rakhshan Rizwan.

The selection also includes short story collections from Belfast author Jan Carson (Postcard Stories, publishing 11/05/17) and Auckland author Leanne Radojkovich (First fox, publishing 16/05/17), a full-colour illustrated poetry book from London poet Julia Bird (Now You Can Look, publishing 14/09/17), and an essay from Belfast author Malachi O’Doherty (Me and my Camera, publishing 16/11/17).

The Birmingham publisher has twice been shortlisted for Michael Marks for Poetry Pamphlet Publishers (2014 and 2015), and has run annual – soon to become biennial – open calls for pamphlet submissions since 2013. The next call for submissions will open in summer 2017.

About the new authors
Andrew Wynn Owen is an Anglo-Welsh poet and an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 2015, he received an Eric Gregory Award and, in 2014, Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize. His first poetry pamphlet, Raspberries for the Ferry, was published by the Emma Press in 2014, followed by a collaboration with John Fuller, AWOL, in 2015.

Emma Simon is from Northamptonshire and now lives in London, where she works part-time as a copywriter and journalist. She was one of the poets chosen for the 2015 Jerwood/Arvon Mentoring schemes and she has been published widely, including in The Very Best of 52 (Nine Arches Press, 2015). She won the Prole Laureate poetry competition in 2013 and was highly commended in the 2015 Battered Moons competition.

Jack Nicholls comes from Cornwall. His poems and stories have been published in the Morning Star, Chicago Quarterly Review, Poems in Which, and he has a poem forthcoming in The Best British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear Publishing). He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is currently based in Manchester, where he runs the live lit cabaret Flim Nite and performs comedy with the sketch group Beach Hunks.

Leanne Radojkovich lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and holds a Masters in Creative Writing. In 2016 one of her stories was translated into Chinese for the 14^th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held in Shanghai, where she also read. Her flash fiction street art has popped up around the globe from USA to Sweden to Tanzania.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts officer based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, was published by Liberties Press in 2014, followed by a short story collection, Children’s Children, in 2016. She won the 2016 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, was shortlisted for the 2016 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize and is one of the highlighted writers in this year’s International Literature Showcase, run by the British Council and Writers’ Centre Norwich.

Padraig Regan was born and lives in Belfast. They graduated with an MA from the Seamus Heaney Centre. A debut pamphlet Delicious was published in 2016. In 2015, Padraig was awarded an Eric Gregory Award.

Zosia Kuczyńska was born in Solihull in 1988 to the children of post-WWII displaced persons from the eastern border of Poland. She grew up in Nottingham, where she is currently a Teaching Affiliate at the University of Nottingham. She has recently completed her doctorate on ‘Time and Space in the Plays of Brian Friel’ at Trinity College Dublin and has had poems published in The Open Ear and with The Lifeboat Belfast.

Carol Rumens is originally from South London and now lives in North Wales, where she teaches creative writing at Bangor University. She has published sixteen collections of poetry, most recently Animal People (Seren, 2016). Her work appears in many anthologies, including The Best British Poetry (2014) and The Forward Anthology (2016). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Rakhshan Rizwan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and then moved to Germany where she studied Literature and New Media. She is currently a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her poems have appeared in The Missing Slate, Postcolonial Text, Blue Lyra Review and Bird’s Thumb, among other publications. She is the winner of the 2015 Judith Khan Memorial Poetry Prize.

Julia Bird grew up in Gloucestershire and now lives and works in London, where she is the Creative Director of the Poetry School and runs her own live literature production company, Jaybird Live Literature. Her collections Hannah and the Monk (2008) and Twenty-Four Seven Blossom (2013) were published by Salt Publishing.

Simon Turner was born in Birmingham and now lives and works in Warwickshire. His second full collection, Difficult Second Album, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2010. In 2013 he won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and the resulting pamphlet, Works on Paper, was published by Seren Books in 2015.

Malachi O’Doherty is a broadcaster, journalist and sometime academic based in Belfast. He has authored seven other published books including works of memoir, The Telling Year and I Was A Teenage Catholic, a celebration of cycling, On My Own Two Wheels, and a biography of Gerry Adams. He was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing by Queen’s University Belfast.

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