Pavilion Poetry will mark five years of extraordinary success with the launch of three new collections as part of fifth birthday celebrations at a special event tomorrow.
Poets Mona Arshi, Lieke Marsman, Sophie Collins and Janette Ayachi will join series editor Professor Deryn Rees-Jones to launch their new collections at the School of Arts library on Wednesday 1 May.
The imprint, which is a joint venture between Liverpool University Press, the University’s Department of English and the Centre For New and International Writing, has now published 14 collections over five years with international recognition and great success.
Mona Arshi’s Dear Big Gods is the follow-up to her Forward Prize-winning debut Small Hands.
Her newest work is described as “beautifully direct”, particularly in its “lyrical and exact exploration of the aftershocks of grief”.
The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes by Dutch writer Lieke Marsman, is inspired by her cancer diagnosis.
Described as “a stringent poetics of limit and capacity, of body and language and self”, the collection is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for 2019, testament to the writing of Marsman and her translator, Sophie Collins (Who is Mary Sue? Faber, 2018).
Janette Ayachi’s debut collection Hand Over Mouth Music “moves between remembered and imagined spaces as she celebrates the world’s variousness, and the energies and exhaustions of the body”. Ayachi is a widely published Scottish-Algerian poet known for her determination to “experience life as acutely as possible”.
The three new titles follow the remarkable success of Pavilion poets, including:
Ruby Robinson’s Every Little Sound (2016) nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize
Alice Miller’s Nowhere Nearer (2018) Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Nuar Alsadir’s Fouth Person Singular (2017) nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Mona Arshi’s win of the Forward Prize for her first collection, Small Hands (2015).
The books will be launched with a reading and wine reception at the University’s School of the Arts Library. All are welcome, register to attend the event here: https://eventbrite.co.uk/e/pavilion-poetry-2019-launch-tickets-58646203373.