Yearly Archives: 2021

Csilla Toldy joins Sanctuary poetry project

Csilla Toldy Photo ©Alistair Livingstone

I am writing a collection of poetry on the theme of sanctuary.

But I’m not doing it  alone. I’ve sought four other poets to contribute a poem each, written in collaboration with me, though originating with them. This approach is prompted by the notion of opening up a space, hosting, welcoming and also from my desire to open myself up, to learn.

I’m delighted to welcome Csilla Toldy to this collaborative venture.

Two of the Sanctuary poets are from Wales and two from Northern Ireland. Because I live in both places. All have experience of migration or a particular interest in sanctuaries.

Given the sanctuary theme, I have sought a poet in Northern Ireland and one in Wales, who has experience of having been a refugee.

Csilla Toldy is a Hungarian, now living in Northern Ireland. She escaped Communist Hungary in 1981, looking for freedom in the West. She is a European who has experienced being a refugee within Europe. As a film maker and writer she has explored themes of arrival and departure, severance and belonging and I am very pleased that she is bringing her long experience of Sanctuary to this proposed book.

Csilla was born  in Budapest.  She lived in many European countries. She moved to the British Isles with a writer’s visa to work on films in 1995. Her writing was supported by British Screen, Media and Northern Ireland Screen, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, National Lottery.

She received a Masters Degree in Creative Writing for Film and Television from Sheffield University in 2003. She participated in workshops lead by: Sundance, Arista, The National Film and Television School.

With her scripts she won the Katapult Prize and The Special Prize of the Motion Pictures Association as the Hungarian winner of the Hartley-Merrill Prize. In 2019 she was quarterfinalist at the Big Break Competition of Final Draft. Her film ‘Belfast Exposed’ recently won Best Street Art Film at the Berlin Underground Film Festival. She wrote ‘The Emigrant Woman’s Handbook with Fil Campbell.

Csilla says,

“I am delighted to be asked to contribute to this project for it will give me the chance to revisit and reevaluate my experience of ’sanctuary’ looking back from a long perspective, and find new meanings.  ” Continue reading Csilla Toldy joins Sanctuary poetry project

Poems in 2 Arachne Press publications

I’m delighted to have a poem accepted for 2 publications by Arachne Press : A470 and Words From The Brink.

An Irishwoman is Introduced to the Major Roads of Wales will appear  in March next year in the anthology  A470

Because I Have Been Complacent About Climate Change will appear in the anthology Words from the Brink and at the Solstice Shorts Festival this December. Continue reading Poems in 2 Arachne Press publications

On The Wall: Place and Displacement 1st draft

“Get it up on the wall,” Des Jones says of plaster. “You can do what you like with it later.” He’s married to my husband’s cousin, Susan and he’s handled a quare few walls in his time. So I’ve got my book on Place and Displacement ‘”up on the wall’ this afternoon, tens of thousands of words, and I’ll put the finishing touches to it when I’ve had a metaphorical cup of tea. (The illustration is the cross-section of the house from the speculator’s submission to Belfast City Council. It’s the dream of the house before it became a reality, one of thousands of parlour houses built for the expanding city.)

I’ve had to go and have a bit of a lie-down too because the work has covered several years of research and preparation and centuries of event and my head is full of architectural and historical details. I received a Support for the Individual Artist Award (SIAP) from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2019 towards research for this book.

This piece of work started as ‘a bit of context’ for a set of poems I’ve written about the house of my childhood and my experiences of growing up in east Belfast in the Sixties and Seventies. It gave me the opportunity to focus the search for my paternal grandfather which I’ve been carrying out, off and on, since the Eighties when I made a TV documentary which touched on some of the material. My grandfather was almost never spoken of in my childhood and it has taken much careful research, over many years, to tease out his story. I kept everything I came across and, over time, connections have matured, as I have, and I feel I am more able, at this stage, to see the broader picture.

It also became a forensic investigation of, not only the house, but the area, the field in which it was built and the people who put up the money for it, designed it, built it and first lived in it. It’s an account of belonging, and not being allowed to belong. Continue reading On The Wall: Place and Displacement 1st draft

Irish Times review of A City Burning

Irish Times Review

Books in brief:  Angela Graham’s evocative short stories

Sat, Jul 10, 2021, 00:00

A City Burning
Angela Graham
Seren, £9.99
Angela Graham’s debut collection of short stories has been longlisted for the 2021 Edge Hill Short Story prize, and it’s not hard to see why. The film-maker and screenwriter’s move into fiction brings with it an eye for perspective, for the power of the vignette to momentarily depict a whole life. There is a craft in the economy of Graham’s prose, as evocative as it is sparse, and the theme of change resonates throughout the collection, as well as the inherently human fear of it. We are not always prepared for the moment when our lives change for ever, and Graham seeks to capture that sense of knowing and not knowing here, inviting us into an intimacy with her characters that is never forced, and always elegiac. BECKY LONG

Edge Hill Short Story Prize longlist for A City Burning

I’m thrilled that my debut short story collection A City Burning has been longlisted for the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021. Now in its 15th year, the Prize  is the only national literary award to recognise excellence in a published, single-authored short story collection.

It’s great to be among this list of writers:

  • Alice Ash Paradise Block (Profile/Serpent’s Tail)
  • Annabel Banks Exercises in Control (Influx)
  • Kevin Barry That Old Country Music (Canongate)
  • Adrian Duncan Midfield Dynamo (Lilliput Press)
  • Angela Graham A City Burning (Seren)
  • Rosanna Hildyard Slaughter (Broken Sleep Books)
  • Rosemary Jenkinson Lifestyle Choice 10MG (Doire Press)
  • A L Kennedy We are Attempting to Survive our Time (Jonathan Cape)
  • Louise Kennedy The End of the World is a Cul-de-Sac (Bloomsbury)
  • Jo Lloyd The Earth, that Great Exchequer, Ready Lies (Swift Press)
  • Graham Mort Like Fado (Salt)
  • John O’Donnell Almost the Same Blue and other stories (Doire Press)
  • Alexandros Plasatis Made by Sea and Wood in Darkness (Spuyten Duyvil)
  • Fernando Sdrigotti Jolts (Influx)
  • Hannah Vincent She-Clown (Myriad Editions)

Previous winners include Colm Tóibín, Tessa Hadley and Daisy Johnson.

The shortlist will be announced in September.

Showcase of Irish Authors – Seren Books

I’m looking forward to taking part in this event, 7pm Tuesday 29th June with three great writers from north and south of the island. Seren Books, the leading literary publishing house in Wales,  has many Irish writers on its list and is kicking off its  40th anniversary celebrations with an Irish focus.

Seren Publisher, Mick Felton says,

The line up for this event is a clear reason why we like to publish authors from Ireland.

Continue reading Showcase of Irish Authors – Seren Books