Saboteur Awards 2019 Category Spotlight: Best Anthology

We have a wonderful selection of anthologies that have been shortlisted for this year’s Saboteur Awards Festival. You can cast your vote for the best of the best until May 12th by checking out the form just here. That said, to give you a little help in deciding, we’ve asked the artists behind the works to tell us a little more about themselves.

May We Borrow Your Country, The Whole Kahani (Linen Press)

The Whole Kahani (The Complete Story), is a collective of British fiction writers of South Asian origin. The group was founded in 2011 by Reshma Ruia and Kavita Jindal. Its aim is to give a new voice to British Asian fiction and increase the visibility of South Asian writers in Britain. The members are award-winning novelists, short story and script writers and poets, and they reflect the entire Indian sub-continent.

We have published two anthologies of short stories and poetry: Love Across a Broken Map and May We Borrow Your Country. Both anthologies explore what it means to straddle geographical, emotional and cultural boundaries in a world that is constantly redefining and questioning the meaning of identity and belonging.

To find out more about The Whole Kahani you can visit their website by clicking here.

Eighty Four, edited by Helen Calcutt (Verve Poetry Press)

Eighty Four is a new anthology of poetry on the subject of male suicide in aid of CALM. Curated by poet Helen Calcutt, the anthology features a host of male and female voices sharing their experiences of suicide, mental health, or grief – from those who have been on the brink of suicide, to those who have lost a loved one, or been moved more generally by the campaign. It is both an uncensored exposure of truths, as well as a celebration of the strength and courage of those willing to write and talk about their experiences, using the power of language to openly address and tackle an issue that directly affects a million people every year.

You can find out more about the book, including how to purchase it, by clicking just here.

High Spirits: A round of drinking stories, edited by Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor (Valley Press)

Chekhov may or may not have drunkenly compared the experience of reading a short story to downing a shot of vodka, and Fitzgerald claimed that a good short story could “be written on a bottle.” This is an anthology of stories about the comedies, tragedies, pleasures and pains of alcohol – all of which can be downed like (and perhaps with) a glass of vodka. These are stories told by drunks, and about drunks, stories told in pubs, stories where people drink, and stories which perhaps induce a sense of drunkenness in their readers. The editors are Jonathan Taylor and Karen Stevens. Jonathan Taylor’s books include the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), the novel Melissa (Salt, 2015) and the poetry collection Cassandra Complex (Shoestring, 2018). Karen Stevens is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester. Her short stories have been widely published, and her edited collection of essays, Writing a First Novel, was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2014.

For more information about this collection, and the publishers behind it, you can click just here.

The Dizziness of Freedom, edited by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall (Bad Betty Press)

Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall started Bad Betty Press in 2017, and set out to publish work that is beautiful, strange, raw and risk-taking. Their first anthology, The Dizziness of Freedom, is a book of poems seeking to deepen the language available for navigating mental health. Bad Betty has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks award and Saboteur’s Most Innovative Press.

Jake Wild Hall won the 2016 Spirit of the PBH Free Fringe award, and hosts Boomerang London. His pamphlet, Solomon’s World was longlisted for Saboteur’s Best Pamphlet.

Amy Acre is the winner of the Verve Poetry Competition. Her pamphlet Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Roads was a PBS Pamphlet Choice and a Poetry School Book of 2015.

For more information about this collection and the press behind it, you can access their website just here.