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RLF Fellows’ News: January 2025

Best Books of 2024

Poetry collections by Mimi Khalvati, Ella Frears and WritersMosaic‘s Karen McCarthy Woolf all featured in the Guardian’s best Poetry Books of 2024, while Jonathan Buckley’s book Tell (Fitzcarraldo) was selected by author Jonathan Coe as one of the best books to give at Christmas.

Publishing

Jane Rogers’ second collection of short stories, Fire-Ready, has been published by Comma Press.

The stories shine an unflinching light on the future health of the planet, and the prospects for its greediest tenants – us. Writer Alice Jolly describes Fire-Ready as “A wise, compassionate and surprising collection which moves seamlessly through time and space, illuminating all the joys and tragedies of the current moment. Rogers reminds us of the extra-ordinary flexibility and vigour of the short story.”

Jane will be in conversation with poet Gaia Holmes at Blackwells in Manchester on 24 February to launch the book. Details here.

Rebecca Watts’  new (third) poetry collection, The Face in the Well is set for publication in January.

As the publisher, Carcanet, describes the collection: “The characters in these dramatic poems play hide-and-seek, guarding their vulnerabilities while yearning for greater connection with others and the world. Animals, as totems and spirit guides, swim, run and fly across the pages… Poets and other heroes – Brontë, Heaney, Plath, Yeats, Mary Poppins – are confronted, reflected, refracted and left echoing anew.”

A launch event takes place at Heffers bookshop in Cambridge on 23 January, with an online launch set for 5 February.

Tony White’s new novel Phantom at the Feast has been acquired by Unbound. London policeman Detective Sergeant Rex King returns in a standalone novel that also completes an overarching story of thirty years told in two interconnected novels, each a self-contained detective mystery in thirty chapters.

It continues White’s decade-long exploration of the ninety days between the end of the Miner’s Strike and the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge on 1 June 1985, reputedly the largest civilian mass arrest in British history. 

More here.

Broadcasts

Ed Harris’s new audio drama War with the Newts was recently broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Adapted from Karel Čapek’s 1936 novel this dark satire about the destruction of mankind at the hands of a new species of newt is set in the present day and follows MP Lili Clay and her family.  Told through promotional videos and news reports, this timely dystopian farce about the economy, ecocide, and extinction, tracks how an apparent utopia grows around us until the newts outsmart us at our own game.

Listen here.

Penny Boxall has released a new spoken word album called Replaying the Tape, as part of her performance collaboration with composer-percussionist Dr Jane Boxall and University of Oxford palaeontologist Dr Frankie Dunn.

Inspired by cutting-edge research into the early origins of life, it blends taped recordings from Dr Dunn’s paleontological digs, live percussion and poetry, contemplating the alternative paths that evolution could have taken, and the role that chance plays in our own existence. What strange kinds of animals might have existed if the dice-throw of evolution had fallen differently?

Listen here.

Roy Williams’ new BBC Radio 3 Drama Gatsby in Harlem (Part 1) – a re-imagining of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby starring Ncuti Gatwa, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Malachi Kirby – will be broadcast on Sunday 12 January, and available to listen to on BBC Sounds until the end of February. More here.

Awards

Patrick Ness has been shortlisted for the Nero Children’s Fiction Award for his book, Chronicles of a Lizard Nobody, which follows lizards Daniel and Zeke as they attempt to impose order on a school full of chaotic animals – well, they are (hall) monitor lizards, after all.

The Nero Book Awards are run by Caffe Nero, in partnership with The Booksellers Association and Brunel University London and award books in the following categories: Children’s Fiction, Fiction, Debut Fiction and Non-Fiction.

Also nominated for a Nero Book Award is Suzannah Dunn, whose Levitation for Beginners was shortlisted for the Nero Fiction Award. Levitation for Beginners is set in 1972, when ten-year-old Deborah encounters new girl Sarah-Jayne, and life in their small rural community begins to change.

Category winners will be announced on 14 January 2025 with the 2024 Nero Gold Prize announced in London on 5 March.

For more information and to see the full list of nominees, visit the Nero Book Awards website.

WritersMosaic‘s Karen McCarthy Woolf has won an RSL Jerwood Poetry Award.

The Jerwood Poetry Awards, run by the Royal Society of Literature, offer a £10,000 stipend and mentoring to poets looking to make a step-change in their careers. There are four awards, representing each of the UK’s regions of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Karen is the representative for England.

For more about the awards and to see the full list of winners, visit the RSL website.

Judith Allnatt’s  flash fiction story War Bride has been shortlisted for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award, run by the Scottish Arts Trust.

All shortlisted stories will be on the Scottish Arts Trust website from the end of January 2025, and will subsequently be published in Edinburgh Anthologies Volume Two, set for release in November 2025. 

Events and appearances

Julian Evans will be reading from and discussing his new book Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War at the Max Minerva’s bookshop in Bristol on 24 January.

Undefeatable is a personal history of Odesa, based on Julian’s experiences. Described as ‘macabre, surreal, haunting, beautifully observed and darkly moving’ by Rory Stewart, the book is published by Scotland Street Press.

Join Julian Evans in conversation with Andrew Harding about how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and how it has become our story too. 

Tickets here.

Claudine Toutoungi will be reading from her latest poetry collection Emotional Support Horse at Cheltenham Poetry Festival’s Online Launch on 3 February.

Published by Carcanet, Michael Symmons Roberts calls these: “poems of great wit and guile, tender and smart and beautiful. If there’s a family line, it’s from Stevie Smith’s domestic macabre or Frederick Seidel’s undercuts, but Emotional Support Horse confirms Claudine Toutoungi as a remarkable talent and a one-off.” This event also includes an open mic slot for single poems.

Tickets and further information here.

Productions

Roy Williams’ play The Lonely Londoners – adapted from the 1956 novel by Sam Sevlon and directed by Ebenezer Bamgboye – opens at the Kiln Theatre on 10 January 2025, following its sold-out run at Jermyn Street Theatre.

The Lonely Londoners explores the realities of the life for the Windrush generation, following Henry ‘Sir Galahad’ Oliver, newly arrived from Trinidad, as he starts his new life in London. 

Buy tickets here.

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