-In which James Webster sums up the categories he presented at the awards- After a lot of voting, some great performances, a brilliant (bank account-busting) book fair and, in addition to the performances, a hilarious video from Best One-Off Event nominated show The Anti-Slam (a show that plumbed the gut-bustingly funny depths of poetic disaster),…
-In which Richard T. Watson sums up the categories he presented at the 2014 Saboteur Awards- Best Magazine Magazines are of course not limited to fiction, and many of this year’s nominees for Best Magazine have long-standing reputations for their printed poetry. Not least of these was Rising, last year’s winner, still the champion of…
For a more in-depth account of each awards, click here for poetry, here for fiction, and here for performances! You can also check out the storify here to get a feel for the night. In the meantime, here are the results: Best Anthology Winner: Weird Lies, ed. Cherry Potts and Katy Darby (Arachne Press) Runner-Up: The Apple Anthology,…
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…
-Compiled by Richard T. Watson- We have a Christmas tradition of sorts at Sabotage: to post a festive round-up of the year’s highlights in December, and to start by (mis)quoting that carol about it being the season to be jolly. And what is Christmas without its twee traditions? So here goes, 365 days from the…
-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 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…
-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…