News

Brendan Cleary, one of the judges of the Poetry School Pighog Press Poetry Pamphlet Competition, has had to return to Belfast at short notice because of a very serious family illness. Sadly he will not be able to fulfil his role as a judge on this occasion. Our thoughts are with Brendan and his family and we wish him well at this difficult time.

Ciaran O'Driscoll has very kindly agreed to replace Brendan on the judging panel with Julia Bird.

We've been keeping an eye on the other best-of-the-year poetry lists, collating our own ideas and re-reading some of our favourite poetry books that we've read this year. I wouldn't say ours was the definitive list, but it is a list, and we do love poems, so you can probably trust us. Again, so many more we loved, so little time and space to write about them. Any glaring omissions? Tweet us @poetryschool or leave a comment on our facebook page, tell us what we should be reading!

Along with our own list of our favourite books of the year, we asked a few of our tutors and students to talk about their favourite books they've read this year. Fawzia Kane talks about Anthony Joseph's Rubber Orchestras.

Meryl Pugh's new course for The Poetry School, Noise, Sound, Silence, will look at silence, when sound becomes noise, and how can we write about aural phenomena. Educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge and the Institute of Education, she has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College. Arrowhead Press published her pamphlet, Relinquish, in 2007. Her second pamphlet, The Bridle, is published by Salt. She is a PhD candidate at UEA and lives in Norwich and East London.

Daam Nillan is a student currently taking online courses with us from Taiwan. He entered this poem into our 'New Worlds' competition. Unfortunately it didn't win, but we thought it was so good it deserved a showing. He grew up in Trabuco Canyon, blogs at Pope Urban, is part of the Zhargon collective and has completed a residency at Joya: arte + ecología / escribir también, as well as two courses with the Poetry School.  An ESL instructor, a migrant/worker, dedicated to a belief in shoestring travel as cultural immersion, he will be joining Peace Boat for their 78th Global Voyage in the eternal summer. Daam Nillan is his pen name.