Salt Modern Voices is a brand new series from Salt which aims to deliver short works to new readerships around the world. These works may be interim or more fugitive publications, experiments or side-projects which have a distinctive literary merit, or they may be the initial works of new talents, issued like an EP prior to the development of a full-length collection and aimed at breaking new talent and building reception for the writer (at any stage of their career). The series will be for poetry and fiction.
Scope of the series
Salt Modern Voices will be low price editions, sold primarily through online retailers, for example, Amazon. The books will not be priced or produced for retail sales in bricks and mortar shops (i.e. repped, held in stock and conventionally distributed, with all those concomitant costs, high discounts and returns).
Titles will only be marketed on the Web and in the context of our emerging Salt Cellars outreach programme of readings, events and workshops, in which writers will be encouraged to participate. Additionally, each book will be made available as an eBook and where possible audio works, available synchronously through a number of channels (e.g. Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, iTunes and Audible). Readers can choose for themselves how they wish to consume their literature. There may also be the opportunity to have material delivered in fragments (a poem or story) to smart phones, including the iPhone.
Print products will be B format (198 x 129mm) 48pp perfect bound paperback chapbooks, priced at £6.50 or $10. Pricing will be the same for any format. In order to keep costs to a minimum, the books will be produced in a standard series design. Authors will have no role to play in the design or manufacture of their print or eBook products.
The books will be issued with standard Salt contracts and authors will be paid royalties. However, there will be no advances.
Risk and innovation
The programme is designed to allow Salt to take greater risks with literature and to find a way of expanding readership with attractively-priced products that allow readers to take a risk on a new writer, helping them to discover more about their work, its range and diversity. The programme will extend to publish around 50 titles per year.
Author information
Salt will commission writers into this programme, we will not accept submissions. Talent-spotting will be linked closely to our developing Salt Cellars, initially in the UK, though we plan to extend this programme internationally over the coming years. It is even envisaged that we will conduct roadshows, allowing writers to audition for the series. We may also make use of scouts and work with other (i.e. non-Salt) literary programmes, workshops, prizes and Creative Writing degrees. There will be no fee to join the programme and Salt will publish writers at their own risk. In addition, we will work with writers and teachers in local communities to identify potential candidates and will, as always, take recommendations (details of which are on our Web site).
Writers selected, and who agree to take part in the new series, will be asked to submit twenty-four poems or an equivalent number of short stories (depending on length) to Salt who will begin work on editing and preparing a final manuscript. The editing process may extend over a period of time.
Once we have jointly agreed upon the final edited content, Salt will issue a contract and take the book into production. At that point authors will be formally required to sign with Salt and complete an author questionnaire as well as provide additional materials (i.e. photographs) to help us effectively market your book. Salt will commit to publish the work within six months.
It is essential that authors have a substantial online presence and are willing to read at local events. We strongly welcome Salt authors and others in the literary community collaborating with each other to help us widen interest in this important new venture.
We are pleased to announce that this year’s Scott Prize winners will be published in October and will be available across the US, Australia and Europe. Meanwhile, here’s a reminder of who the winners are:
Patrick Holland
Patrick Holland grew up in outback Queensland, Australia, where his first jobs were horse work in Maranoa district and the top end. He has travelled widely throughout Asia and has studied language and literature at Qingdao University and Beijing Foreign Studies University on PRC scholarship, as well as Ho Chi Minh Social Sciences University in Vietnam. He currently lives in Brisbane where, on a typewriter that belonged to his mother, he pursues a form of literary minimalism inspired by Arvo Pärt, Ernest Hemingway and Yasunari Kawabata.
His novel The Long Road of the Junkmailer won the Queensland Premier’s Award for Best Emerging Author and his second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys will be published by Transit Lounge Press.
His Salt collection, The Source of the Sound follows the journeys of exiles in search of home. Each story makes a study of light and dark; else noise, sound and silence. It is his first collection.
Susannah Rickards
Susannah Rickards comes from Newcastle on Tyne. She read English at Oxford University then worked in the theatre for ten years and the travel industry for five before turning to writing. Her fiction has been broadcast on BBC radio and featured in anthologies and a variety of literary magazines including The New Writer. She’s won an Eastside Bursary, a Hawthornden Fellowship and The Conan Doyle Award. Her work has been shortlisted and placed in competitions including Fish, Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and Commonwealth Short Story. Her first novel was shortlisted for the Cinnamon Prize last year. She lives near London with her husband and twin sons.
Tom Vowler
Tom Vowler lives on the edge of Dartmoor, in the UK. In 2009 he received an Arts Council grant to research and write a novel, which he blogs about here: http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com He started writing short stories on his creative writing MA; things got out of hand, and soon there was a collection. He’s rarely happier than when traipsing across the moor, reading in a good pub, or on the cricket field. He’s rarely unhappier than when in a city, the pub is closed, or the game is rained off. He is the Assistant Editor of the literary journal SHORT Fiction.
Our hats go off to Jim Murdoch for writing what has to be the most Unconventional Review of the Year. His review of Elizabeth Baines’ Too Many Magpies was written in installments as he read the book. It is a captivating read as we follow his reactions to the plot and the characters revealing themselves — click on the link here to find out how Jim got on. And when you find yourself itching to read the book, all you have to do is click here and it will be delivered straight to you door!
StAnza 2010 starts this Wednesday, 17th March and runs until 21st March. Salt authors at the festival include Will Stone, Matthew Sweeney, Rob A. MacKenzie, Tom Pow and Victor Rodriguez Núñez.
Check out the full list of events on the official website www.stanzapoetry.org.
You can book tickets through the StAnza Box Office, Byre Theatre 01334 475000 or Online through the website.
Chris McCabe has written a brilliant new piece, a ‘play of voices’ exploring the history of London’s docks, with live music from Bleeding Heart Narrative and original film by Jack Wake-Walker. Iain Sinclair introduces Shad Thames, Broken Wharf on 18th March.
Tickets cost £8 adv / £10 door | Starts 7.30pm at Jamboree, Cable Street Studios.
Performance Poetry Special
Luke Kennard joins Tim Turnbull and Laura Dockrill for a performance poetry special, with an additional gruesome Powerpoint presentation on heartbreak on 24th March.
Tickets cost £6.50 adv / £8 door | Starts 7pm at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club.
The London Word Festival is on until 1st April. Check out the website www.londonwordfestival.com for more details.
Chrissie Gittins was appointed Writer-in-residence with the borough of Lewisham in January. She has a ‘room of her own’ in the attic at Forest Hill Library. Lewisham Library Service is launching her third children’s poetry collection – A Humpback’s Wail at the Grade II listed Manor House Library on 24th April. She will be working with Lewisham schools and with the Horniman Museum.
In addition, for the month of September, Chrissie will be resident writer with Shetland Arts on the Shetland Islands. She will stay right next to the sea in The Booth in Scalloway. As well as taking part in the 2010 Wordplay Festival and visiting Shetland schools she will have two weeks for her own work.
We are delighted to announce that Charlotte Prince has been appointed as Sales Manager. Charlotte will manage accounts with bookstores (both chains and independents) in the USA and Europe. She will continue to take Salt’s list to our established customers in the trade, as well as forging new relationships with booksellers.
Charlotte will now actively working to take Salt titles to a wider range of key independent bookstores across the UK and Ireland, forging new partnerships and alliances. She will gradually extend this role to the USA, Canada and continental Europe.
Beside retail sales, Charlotte will improve and expand Salt’s dealings with library suppliers and wholesale distributor accounts in the UK and USA, in particular developing library sales and schools sales with an emphasis on our fiction, poetry, children’s and academic lists.
As well as controlling Salt’s key trade accounts, Charlotte will continue to develop direct sales strategies and promotions for the front and backlist — working with our several thousand online customers. We congratulate her on this enhanced role within the Salt management team and wish her continued success.
Edited by A. Robert Lee, this first book on Jim Barnes’ work, which fully recognises his mix of Anglo-Welsh and Choctaw Oklahoma heritage, could not be timelier – it is a long overdue tribute.
“The one right word,” as he writes in ‘The Poet’s Paradise,’ has long been a Jim Barnes desideratum. Across an illustrious literary career that has produced nine volumes of verse from This Crazy Land (1980) to Visiting Picasso (2007), there can be little doubt of seriously dedicated verve, a craftsman’s eye and ear. His landmark autobiography, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions(1997) adds its own weight, a life and its imaginative turn running from hard-scrub Oklahoma birth and mixed Anglo-Celtic and Choctaw lineage, through Oregon logging in the 1950s, to an eventual professorial career at Truman State University, Missouri (1970-2003) and Brigham Young University (2003-2006).
He is the author of an important comparative study, The Fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann: Structural Tradition (1990), a prize-winning translator of the Munich poet Dagmar Nick, and for over nearly four decades the editor of the poetry journal The Chariton Review. This first-ever volume of essays dedicated to his work is both belated and timely recognition.
The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes includes: ‘Bones Beneath My Feet’, a wide-ranging interview with Barnes, his life and writing. Contributions include a personal salute (Ken Lincoln), an across the board map of his poetry (A. Robert Lee), scrutiny of the early verse (Lance Larsen) and of the verse of the middle years (Samuel Maio), an account of Barnes’s postcard poems (Linda Helstern), and an excavation of the Barnes-Dylan Thomas connection (James Mackay). Three essays link the poetry to Native Grounds: Memoirs and Impressions (Robin Riley Fast, Paul Beekman Taylor and Patricia Clark Smith). “Poetry makes everything happen” said Jim Barnes on being appointed Oklahoma’s poet laureate in 2008. It could not speak better to his own achievement.
The Poetry Society announces the shortlist for the inaugural Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry
The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry seeks to recognise excellence in poetry, highlighting outstanding contributions made by poets to our cultural life.
Jackie Kay for Maw Broon Monologues (performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow). A full-length performance combining rhythmic verse, music and theatre.
Dannie Abse for New Selected Poems 1949-2009: Anniversary Collection (published by Hutchinson 2009). A celebration of the 60th anniversary of Dannie Abse’s first collection After Every Green Thing.
Paul Farley for Field Recordings: BBC Poems (1998-2008) (published by Donut Press 2009). This work brings together Farley’s broadcast poetry for the BBC over a ten-year period.
John Glenday for Grain (published by Picador 2009). Fourteen years in the making Grain is at times delicately lyrical and at times playful or surreal.
Alice Oswald for Weeds and Wild Flowers (published by Faber and Faber 2009). This is a magical meeting of the visionary poems of Alice Oswald and the darkly beautiful etchings of Jessica Greenman.
Andrew Motion for The Cinder Path (published by Faber and Faber 2009). Motion’s collection offers a spectrum of lyrics, love poems and elegies all exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them.
With the permission of Carol Hughes, this innovative award is named in honour of Ted Hughes and recognises the many ways poets are working today, in printed forms and beyond. Poetry collections for adults and children were considered alongside radio poems, film poems, public art inscriptions and works for the stage. The £5,000 prize money has been donated by Carol Ann Duffy, funded from the annual honorarium that the Poet Laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen. Any UK living poet, working in any form, who made the most exciting contribution to poetry between 1 January 2009 – 31 December 2009, was eligible for the award.
Duffy was delighted with the judge’s choices: “The Ted Hughes Award is named in honour of a great laureate and celebrates new work in poetry, in any medium. I am thrilled at the diversity of the shortlist which the judges have announced today.”
