Terry Ann Thaxton sifts through [...]]]> Win a one of three free copies of Terry Ann Thaxton’s amazing new debut collection, Getaway Girl — to enter simply answer the three questions below and email your entries to competitions@saltpublishing.com. We’ll choose three random winners from the correct entries. Offer ends on Friday March 25th 2011.

Terry Ann Thaxton sifts through the images of a childhood half-buried among the pines and saw palmetto of her native Florida and unearths a child orphaned by abuse. In a home where “Southern Baptists exchange judgments,” she hides among a tribe of siblings, roaming the woods and playing games that hold equal degrees of cruelty and love. At the first opportunity she flees – into the arms of more abuse, then, wildly, into years where “suitcases fell from the closet” and “she thinks of marching toward [the pond], / perhaps reaching a gray cloud, pulling the switch.” And yet, somehow, “the sky offers its philanthropy all day.” The genealogy of despair is also the genealogy of hope. In the search to clarify the past–and thus transform the present – these poems turn over the shards of memory like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope, looking for an angle that will light up the great mystery of how we become and continue becoming who we are.

Competition

Question 1. Whose novel, The Getaway, appeared in 1958?

Question 2.. Who directed the 1972 film of the novel in question 1, which starred Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw?

Question 3. which groundbreaking R&B and funk band sang the 1976 smash hit Getaway, released from their Spirit album?

Find our Sneaky Robot Santa and you could win a copy of all six of our 2010 Crashaw Prize winners!

To enter simply find the Santa displayed here — he’s hiding on one of our 2010 titles, you can discover a list [...]]]>

Grab some award-winning new poetry for Christmas in our latest competition…

Find our Sneaky Robot Santa and you could win a copy of all six of our 2010 Crashaw Prize winners!

To enter simply find the Santa displayed here — he’s hiding on one of our 2010 titles, you can discover a list of them by clicking here.

Once you’ve found him, simply email the name of the page he appears on to: competitions@saltpublishing.com with the subject line Sneaky Robot Santa on or before 10th November 2010.

We’ll pick a winner on the 11th November — the date we’ll be officially publishing all this year’s Crashaw Prize winners: Nathan Hoks, Andrew Pidoux, Nick Potamitis, Jonty Tiplady, Ryan van Winkle, and Anna Woodford.

Discover the 2010 Crashaw Prize winners

Our groundbreaking new children’s titles make the ideal Christmas presents and to celebrate their publication we’re giving away a complete set of eight in our first Christmas competition.

These highly collectable pocket books are the perfect for your children, your grandchildren or for your local school. To enter, simply look at these three questions [...]]]>

Our groundbreaking new children’s titles make the ideal Christmas presents and to celebrate their publication we’re giving away a complete set of eight in our first Christmas competition.

These highly collectable pocket books are the perfect for your children, your grandchildren or for your local school. To enter, simply look at these three questions below and email your answers to competitions@saltpublishing.com

We’ll choose a winner next Tuesday, the 9th November.

Salt’s Children’s Poetry Library — click on the books to find out more!

1. Who is this famous children’s poet? (Be cautious when answering!)

2. Who wrote this poem?

The Listeners

“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest’s ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:—
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

3. Who “came whiffling through the tulgey wood”?

How do I enter?

Get your summer [...]]]>
As you know, Salt Magazine is twenty years old this year, and Salt’s publishing business is now ten years old. We’ve decided to put together a whopping prize to celebrate, and entering it means you will directly help Salt to continue to thrive during the recession.

How do I enter?

Get your summer reading sorted with great new books from Salt. Buy directly from us between now and 31st August 2010 and each and every book you buy will give you a raffle ticket in our unique #BigSaltPrize. You can buy #JustOneBook or you can buy more, but each book will count in the prize draw. Remember you get 20% off any book you buy from us and larger orders are shipped post free.

What do I win?

On 1st September 2010, we’ll choose our winners.

1. First prize: one lucky winner will be selected to receive the next 20 new Salt titles we publish absolutely free — the offer is for books in print, not for eBooks. As they’re published, you’ll be sent a physical copy of each new publication post-free.
2. Second prize: A signed book of your choice and your chance to ask the author five burning questions. [Subject to the author's availability.]
3. Third prize: A free book of your choice, delivered post-free.

When does it start?

It starts right now. Here are some recent books to whet your appetite, we know you’ll love each and every one:

Good luck!

The Method Men is the much anticipated first collection by Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs: a taut, deft and elegant book, featuring poems previously published in magazines such as Magma, Poetry Review, Iota and Poetry Wales, and in small groups of three or four in significant anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British [...]]]>

The Method Men is the much anticipated first collection by Eric Gregory Award winner, David Briggs: a taut, deft and elegant book, featuring poems previously published in magazines such as Magma, Poetry Review, Iota and Poetry Wales, and in small groups of three or four in significant anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010).

Briggs’s work doffs its cap to a wide range of influences, from the Graveyard School to Miroslav Holub, from John Ash to Ted Hughes, from Marianne Moore to Charles Boyle; yet, retains its own distinctive sensibility — a concern with the idiosyncratic strategies we employ in attempting to navigate an ineffable and dangerous, yet quotidian, world. Pylons, the blank pages at the end of a book, an album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, bathrooms, public parks, clowns and teacups are all lit at the edges with a gunsmoke-blue glow by a transform imagination.

The Method Men explores, in a sometimes disarmingly personal way, what Larkin referred to as ‘a style our lives bring with them’ — what we are, and how that came to be.

To enter the competition answer the five following questions and send your answers to competitions@saltpublishing.com:

1. Where does David Briggs work?

2. In which major new Bloodaxe anthology does Briggs’s work appear?

3. Name two graveyards that appear in The Method Men.

4. In which year did David Briggs win an Eric Gregory Award?

5. From which book is the epigraph to the collection taken?

Winners of the Manuel Muñoz The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue competition are: Robert Burdock, Steve Dempsey, Jay Merill and Stephen Pain.

Winners of our Eleanor Rees Eliza and the Bear competition [...]]]>
Entering our competitions? Remember to check back on the comments to the competition after the deadline to see if you’ve won!

Winners of the Manuel Muñoz The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue competition are: Robert Burdock, Steve Dempsey, Jay Merill and Stephen Pain.

Winners of our Eleanor Rees Eliza and the Bear competition are: Jenny Hope, Michelle McGrane, Wayne Preece, Jane Willis and Jessica Wren Butler.

Winners of our Short Circuit (ed, Vanessa Gebbie) competition are: Jenny Beattie, Emily Dening, Marko Fong, Andie Lewenstein and Sallie Tams.

Many congratulations to all. More competitions coming!

Short Circuit is the first textbook written by prize-winning writers for students and more experienced practitioners of the short story. The 288 page guide brings together twenty-four specially-commissioned essays from well-published short story writers who are also prize winners of [...]]]> We’ve five free copies of Vanessa Gebbie’s new textbook Short Circuit to give away.

Short Circuit is the first textbook written by prize-winning writers for students and more experienced practitioners of the short story. The 288 page guide brings together twenty-four specially-commissioned essays from well-published short story writers who are also prize winners of the toughest short story competitions in the English language, including five essays from winners of The Bridport Prize. There are interviews with Clare Wigfall — winner of The National Short Story Award — and with Tobias Hill whose short story collection won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award.

To enter the competition answer the three following questions:

1. Who is this?
   
   
2. Which story begins “Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center.”
3. Which story begins “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”

We’ll choose five winners from among the correct entries. Email your responses with the subject line “Short Circuit Competition” to: competitions@saltpublishing.com

Offer expires 14th November 2009

Eleanor Rees’s first collection, Andraste’s Hair was shortlisted for Best First Collection in the 2007 Forward Prizes and for the 2008 Glen Dimplex Poetry Award. In her second full-length collection she continues to play the role of [...]]]> We’ve five free copies of Eleanor Rees’s new poetry collection Eliza and the Bear to give away.

Eleanor Rees’s first collection, Andraste’s Hair was shortlisted for Best First Collection in the 2007 Forward Prizes and for the 2008 Glen Dimplex Poetry Award. In her second full-length collection she continues to play the role of mythologiser and tale teller, moving away from her previous subject, the imagined city, into the magical psyches of changeling creatures.

In powerful nocturnal encounters silent visitors travel from the dark world, take on elemental form and embrace Rees’s narrators with sensual and erotic urgency. Laced with tales of physical transformations, Rees’s use of fairy stories and night visions radically reimagines the female experience through the psychic collisions of the body and our desires.

To enter the competition, just answer three questions:

1. Name this person
   
   
2. Which book of ‘infernal machines’ appeared in 1971? (Give me the full title)
3. Which surreal tale of twins and show business appeared by this author in 1991?

We’ll choose five winners from among the correct entries. Email your responses to: competitions@saltpublishing.com

Offer expires 13th November 2009

Manuel Muñoz’s dazzling second collection finds the author returning, once again, to the small towns of California’s Central Valley. Set in a neighborhood with characters whose lives often intersect with each other, The Faith Healer of Olive [...]]]> We’ve five free copies of Manuel Muñoz’s “The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue” to give away.

Manuel Muñoz’s dazzling second collection finds the author returning, once again, to the small towns of California’s Central Valley. Set in a neighborhood with characters whose lives often intersect with each other, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue offers ten stories about a wide range of lives: a mother coping with a mortally injured son after his motorcycle accident; a single father returning from San Francisco and attempting a reconciliation with an estranged sister; a young woman trying to provide safe haven to her cousin fleeing a vicious boyfriend; and a teenager who sees himself in the trials of the town’s most-gossiped-about resident. How these characters cross paths reveal a neighborhood shaped by misunderstandings and long-held secrets, and show how a community can be both embracing and unforgiving, revealing a truth about the nature of home: you always live with its history.

To enter the competition, look at the image below and answer three questions:

1. Who are these two people?
2. Which famous photographer took the shot?
3. In which city was it taken?

We’ll choose five winners from among the correct entries. Email your responses to: competitions@saltpublishing.com

Offer expires 5th November 2009