blog.saltpublishing.com » Salt Cellars (London)

Simon Barraclough on poetry and planets

Simon Barraclough — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:36:35 +0000

Ahead of the launch of my second Salt collection Neptune Blue, I had a long chat with South African poet and blogger Michelle McGrane over at ‘Peony Moon’. Among other things, we spoke about poetry sequences, planets, Sparklehorse and dancing around the living room to Gustav Holst. You can read the full interview here.

Neptune Blue will be published on July 15th 2011. In the meantime you can read four poems from it here.

Ben Okri, Philip Wells & Tanya Auclair at Book Slam, London, 21st April

Chris Hamilton-Emery — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:46:56 +0000

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Book Slam @ The Tabernacle

Powis Square, London, W11 2AY
Doors open at 6pm, stuff starts at 7.30pm sharp!

Book Slam is London’s best (and only) literary nightclub.

Tickets:

£8 in advance / £10 on the door

Book Slam will be stirring dull roots with Spring rain in the company of:—

BEN OKRI – A giant of contemporary literature, author of ‘The Famished Road’ and now ‘A Time For New Dreams’, and, we reckon, the only Booker Prize-winner on MySpace.
PHILIP WELLS – The Fire Poet is a phenomenon who has performed in front of Prime Ministers, Robbie Williams and Joanna Lumley. He also introduced Patrick to the power of spoken word …
TANYA AUCLAIR – One of the capital’s best kept secrets, a singer-songwriter of broad influences, beguiling sensibilities and utter charm.
Hosted by CHARLIE DARK — poet, DJ, raconteur, bon viveur and long distance runne(u)r …

Good food available. And long-forgotten R ’n’ B from the late ’90s …

London Salt Cellar: Salt Poets at The Poetry Cafe

Chris Hamilton-Emery — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:51:53 +0000

Join five Salt authors for a varied and stimulating evening of poetry readings at this acclaimed poetry hub in the capital. Reading from their latest collections will be:
Eleanor Rees, Tamar Yoseloff, Simon Smith, Agnieszka Studzinska and Julia Bird. Date: Saturday, 18 September 2010
Venue: The Poetry Cafe, 22 Betterton St, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9BX

7pm – 9pm / Free

For more information on The Poetry Cafe visit The Poetry Society website or telephone 020 7420 9887.

Listen to the #SaltFlashMob from AudioBoo

Chris Hamilton-Emery — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:00:30 +0000

You can hear Jen’s AudioBoo of the Salt FlashMob. Not a huge turnout, but we weren’t expecting a massive show. Saturday’s are for family and relaxing after all. We had a quality turnout and met up with Tim Wells after the event for a drink in the bar of the Festival Hall. Lots of competition from other SBC events, including semi-naked Brazilian dancers and bands.

As we completed our event and were stepping away from the spot on the patio, poet Giles Goodland stared at our feet and pointed out that there was a tiny blue sachet of Salt. To which we all bellow, “A Sign! A Sign!” It was of course a sign to go and grab a drink and have a chat. A great day and lots of fun. London was packed and after it was all over we wandered up to Piccadilly Circus and found a little Italian and had a meal before heading back to Cambridge. Thanks to everyone for coming and to everyone who also did a virtual FlashMob on their blogs! We’ll pick up on those as we discover them; here’s a few:

Elizabeth Baines
Sarah-Clare Conlon
Katy Evans-Bush
Sue Guiney
Aditi Machado
Andrew Philip
Andrea Porter
Barbara Smith

Listen!

Don’t Miss Wena Poon at the South Bank Centre

Jen — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:49:43 +0000

One of Asia’s new literary stars, Wena Poon, performs from Alex y Robert, a witty novel about the American granddaughter of a famous Spanish bullfighter who returns to Spain to become a matador. Winner of the 2010 Willesden Prize in England, twice long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Award in Ireland, Wena has been lauded by critics for her acute observations of transnational culture.

Don’t miss your chance to hear Wena perform at the South Bank Centre on Monday, 12th July. For more information and tickets, please follow this link to the South Bank Centre’s booking system. I promise you it’ll be a thoroughly entertaining evening – we hope to see you there!

The Edge Hill Prize, Phoenix Artist Club and Salt Launch

Jen — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:05:11 +0000

Yesterday I had such a brilliant day in London. It felt like I’d been trapped in the office for an age, so it was so good to get on the train and head to the big city. It was the Edge Hill Short Story awards, which were being held at Blackwells on Charing Cross Road and one of our books NUDE by the talented Nuala Ni Chonchuir, had been shortlisted. Nuala, her husband and baby daughter had flown in from Galway, arriving just as the event started, and then flying out at the crack of dawn to Cork as Nuala was teaching there in the morning.

Jeremy Dyson (writer for the League of Gentlemen) won with his collection The Cranes that Built the Cranes, and the lovely Robert Shearman won the Readers’ Prize for his Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical. It was great to meet Robert and Nuala again, as well as Adam Marek (who was shortlisted for the Daily Telegraph short story comp), Elizabeth Baines (Salt author of Too Many Magpies, Balancing on the Edge of the World and the forthcoming The Birth Machine) and Salt poet Robert Sheppard. (Robert, Nuala and Elizabeth are pictured here.)

Before the event started, I met up with Salt author Wena Poon. I have only ever met her in exotic locations: Cork, Singapore, Edinburgh and now London. Okay, London may not be exotic to some, but it is to me! We went for a lovely cake and coffee and caught up on her recent trip to Scotland and made arrangements for the launch of her novel Alex y Robert, which is happening at the South Bank Centre on Monday. Here is a short video of Wena being interviewed about it; I’m going to go (you come to; there’s a link here!) and I’m sure it’ll go much better than Wena predicts!:

After the awarding of the prizes, I popped over the road to Foyles to see if that was where a Salt launch was being held. Lee from the Office had taken newly published gorgeous books down on the train that afternoon for Agnieszka Studzinska, David Briggs and Mark Granier, who were holding a joint launch, but it wasn’t at Foyles and I couldn’t for the life of me think where it could be, so I joined the Edge Hill peeps and headed across the road to the Phoenix Club.This is a private members artists club which had a really lovely, relaxed but vibrant atmosphere. Every now and again they would jet dry ice into the room as a special touch. There were photos of actors on the wall and one end of the room was curtained off, probably for VIP members. We’d been there about an hour when I suddenly found myself face to face with Lee from the Office. I wondered if I’d drunk more than I thought, but no, he’d just stepped out from behind the curtain — that was where the launch was taking place!

What a great evening: a host of poets and a gaggle of short story writers! I met David, Mark and Agnieszka for the first time, as well as the familiar friendly faces of Salties Tamar Yoseloff and Katy Evans Bush. Lee and I got back to Cambridge at midnight. Wonderful!

Send us your ideas for developing superb events with Salt Cellars

Chris Hamilton-Emery — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 14:09:29 +0000

We need your help. We’re busy developing ideas for taking our Salt Cellars programme forward, but we want to open that out to our authors and our friends.

Booksellers, and especially independent booksellers, are central to the future of Salt Cellars. We’re looking for ideas to develop Salt events in collaboration with local booksellers. That could involve performances, workshops, interviews, performances, collaborations with libraries, schools, writing and reading groups.

Our main aim is to serve local book buyers with high quality Salt author events.

A little bit of context:

The point of a Salt Cellar event is to sell great books with and through local booksellers. There are many events already which are about live literature, but ours will be about creating themed events which sell books to our readers.
Events should be, above all else, entertaining; they should have diverse content; they are allowed to be fun. They might involve music and film, participation and audience involvement, and an element of theatre.
No Salt Cellar event should be planned without the involvement of a bookseller, they can handle all the sales and everyone wins: author, publisher, bookseller and most of all, the reader. That means testing out ideas with a local bookseller early on, before spending any time and effort (and money) on an event. The bookseller will have ideas of their own, too.
Where possible we think an event should be repeatable, and toured among interested booksellers within a given region.
We strongly suspect events must have a single, cohesive, imaginative idea behind them — something that holds the bookshop event together and will bring in an audience; it must be well-branded and well-marketed.
Everyone must work with the local media to bring in a decent audience. No stone must be left unturned in helping to create an audience (local radio, local listings mags, local newspapers, blogs and bulletin boards, even village notice boards, not to mention Facebook and Twitter).

If you think you have a strong idea and can pull the people together to make it happen, contact us now. You can email the Queen of the Salt Cellars, Sarah-Jayne Johnson at sarah-jayne@saltpublishing.com with your ideas.

Triple Book Launch

Sarah-Jayne — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:02:47 +0000

Thursday 8th July 2010

Join Agnieszka Studzinska, David Briggs and Mark Granier at The Phoenix Artist Club, Charing Cross, London to celebrate the launch of their fantastic new poetry collections, Snow Calling, The Method Men and Fade Street.

The event starts at 7pm and is free.

Please do check out The Phoenix Artist Club website for directions: http://www.phoenixartistclub.com/aboutus.html

Remember to keep checking your local Salt Cellars page for all the latest events happening in your area.

These great titles are available now from our online store with 20% off.

Latest Salt Cellar London Events

Sarah-Jayne — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:03:37 +0000

Ride the Word XX

Book Launch of God of the Pigeons by Jay Merill

her latest short story collection, published by SALT April 2010

6.30pm-9pm / free entry
also starring:
Vincent de Souza – SALT, poet - (Weightless Road, Resurrecting Knives)
Plus Special Guests:
Waterloo Press, with readers:
John Donoghue, Simon Jenner & Niall McDevitt
and
Naomi Foyle
also
Completely Novel, introduced by Anna Lewis
with readers
FLOOR SPOTS WELCOME! (on a first come first served basis)
Hosted by Jay Merill and Vincent de Souza

The Phoenix Artists Club Charing Cross Road (1 Phoenix Street) London WC2H ODT

(Nearest Tube, Tottenham Court Rd, or Leicester Square)
The Phoenix is opposite Foyles & St Martins Art School on Charing X Rd

Coffee-House Poetry: A Summer Chorus with Katherine Gallagher, Andrea Porter, Linda Black, Clare Best, Anne Stewart, Cori A Winrock, Laura Bottomley & Paul Stephenson.

8pm-10pm / £7 (Cons £6)

New and established poets read to celebrate the start of Summer 2010 at the Troubadour, 263-267 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 9JA:

* Fifth collection from Australian-born Katherine Gallagher is Carnival Edge: New & Selected Poems (Arc, 2010)
* Anne Stewart is the founder/editor of PoetryPF, the online poet showcase, and won the 2008 Bridport Prize
* Andrea Porter’s pamphlet, Bubble, became a Sony-Award-nominated radio play — A Season of Small Insanities (Salt, 2009) is her first collection
* Clare Best’s Treasure Ground (Happenstance, 2009) features poems from her innovative residency at an organic farm in Lincolnshire
* Laura Bottomley is a Research Assistant and part-time lecturer at Kingston University
* Linda Black — Inventory (Shearsman, 2008) — won the 2006 New Writing Ventures Poetry Award
* Paul Stephenson lives in North London, teaches in the Netherlands and was shortlisted for the 2009 Bridport Prize
* Cori A Winrock’s poetry has been shortlisted for numerous American prizes—she is spending a year in London following a Cornell MFA.

Link for directions: http://www.troubadour.co.uk/troubadour/directions.html

Link for other Coffee-House Poetry Events: http://www.coffeehousepoetry.org/

Salt Author at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

Sarah-Jayne — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:59:04 +0000

Tower Poetry – A Tower Miscellany
Launch of A Tower Miscellany, edited by Peter McDonald, marking 10 years of Tower Poetry. Peter McDonald, poet, will host the event and introduce readings by some of the featured poets. Miscellany poets include Frances Leviston, Stephen Burt, Olivia Cole and Miriam Gamble and the event will feature poets reading their work. Tower Poetry, based at Christ Church, aims to stimulate an enjoyment and critical appreciation of poetry, particularly among young people, and to encourage them to write their own poetry.

Monday 22nd March 2010|Christ Church, Blue Boar Lecture Theatre, Oxford |16:00-1700|£7| Book tickets here