Nominations for the 2014 Saboteur Awards are now open! Tickets can be bought here. Like the literature and performances they celebrate, the Saboteur Awards are ephemeral and ever-changing. But some things stay the same: we’re always looking to reward work that has, since our last awards, really made us and/or our readers sit up and take notice…
-in which James Webster sums up the categories he presented at the awards – Best Performer When it came down to the final day, Best Spoken Word Performer was the most closely contested of all the categories, with first place going back and forth several times and only three votes separating the winner and runner-up.…
-in which Claire Trévien sums up the categories she presented at the awards- Best poetry pamphlet The Best Poetry Pamphlet category was one of the most closely fought over category, displaying a wonderful range of experimental, sci-fi, and decadent verse. During the entire month, however, there were two clear frontrunners, with runner up Sarah Hymas’…
-In which Richard T. Watson sums up the Fiction side of the Saboteur 2013 Awards- The first of the Fiction stable’s awards was for the Best Short Story Collection by a single author. Four out of five nominees were traditionally-printed books, while one (Superbard’s The Flood) was designed specifically for the iPad and featured a…
A more in-depth post will come soon, with comments from voters, logos for each winner, pictures and links to videos from the night (if you have any, do email them to us!), but we thought some of you might like to know as soon as possible who won in each category. You can find links…
-Reviewed by Rory O’Sullivan- Here’s an idea: invite some of your colleagues in the writing scene to submit individual pieces of short fiction, novel excerpts, verse, screenplay and other literary minutiae – all of which must honour a pre-determined theme – collate them, shuffle them into a polished sequence, then sit back and watch your…
-Reviewed by Ian Chung- Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts is a new literary magazine published by the Writers’ Forum at Sacred Heart College, India. At the risk of sounding overly glib, the preceding sentence encapsulates what I found most problematic about this literary project, namely its lack of focus. It almost feels as…
-Reviewed by Nick Sweeney- The Middle is a short, powerful book about journeys, both actual and metaphorical, through hope and failure, but ultimately towards the suggestion, at least, of some kind of redemption. The characters, a boy – actually in his late teens – a man who feels the breath of middle age on his…
-Reviewed by Lucy Ayrton- Adventures in Form is a beautifully curated anthology of contemporary poets engaging strongly with form in their work. The poems are clustered under 15 areas (Code is Poetry, Traditional Revised and Correspondence, to name three), each reflecting an approach to exploring form. The introduction to the book (by Tom Chivers) was…
-Reviewed by Charlotte Barnes- I approached Second Lives: Tales From Two Cities with apprehension, given that I was somewhat unprepared for what the anthology would contain. It markets itself as a collection of views provided by various writers in order to portray individual perceptions on the once-industrial cities of Glasgow and Pittsburgh. The anthology combines…