PN Review Winter Launch at Castlefield Gallery

As promised, following a standing-room-only event during the summer, the regular PN Review launch is back and can now count itself as a regular fixture on the live lit scene.

Manchester-based poetry and criticism magazine PN Review turned 45 in 2018, having started life back in 1973 as twice-yearly hardback Poetry Nation, morphing into a quarterly A4 paperback publication in 1976 and starting to appear six times a year in 1981. And it’s still going strong, hitting shelves every other month with a proper good read of news articles, letters, interviews, features, poems, translations and a substantial book review section.

With a new issue out, PNR general editor Michael Schmidt (also the founder and editorial and managing director of poetry publishing house Carcanet Press) will introduce this showcase of six recent contributors, featuring readings from Jonathan Catherall, Suzannah V Evans, Richard Gwyn, André Naffis-Sahely, Jamie Osborn and Claudine Toutoungi.

Jonathan Catherall is editor of the online poetry magazine Tentacular and has published poems in Datableed, 3AM, Tears in the Fence, Envoi, Visual Verse and The Frogmore Papers. He has performed his work at Caplet, Words & Jazz and in the spontaneous poetry/art collaboration event Erratic Scores, and has reviewed for The Literateur and The Wolf.

Suzannah V Evans is a poet, editor and critic, and a selection of her poems was recently longlisted for the 2018 Ivan Juritz Prize for creative responses to modernism. She has written for the TLS, PN Review, The London Magazine, Magma, New Welsh Review, The North, The Modernist Review and Brittle Star, and she is reviews editor for The Compass.

Richard Gwyn is the author of three novels, including The Blue Tent (due out in 2019), and four collections of poetry, most recently Stowaway, which was published in 2018. His work as a translator from Spanish includes the anthology The Other Tiger: Recent Poetry from Latin America and he is Professor of Creative Writing at Cardiff University.

Jamie Osborn is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in the Carcanet New Poetries VII anthology, which came out in April 2018, and PN Review and other literary magazines including the TLS, Poetry London, Blackbox Manifold and Perverse. He is working on a series of poems based on experiences volunteering with refugees on the Greek island of Chios and his translations of poems by Assyrian Iraqi refugees featured in the Great Flight issue of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Claudine Toutoungi has been published by PN Review and in Carcanet’s 2015 anthology New Poetries VI, and her debut collection, Smoothie, was published by Carcanet in September 2017. Her poems have also appeared in publications including Poetry (Chicago), The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Spectator, Magma, The Tangerine, The North and Poems in Which. She also writes dramas for Radio 4 and theatre – her play Slipping premiered in the UK at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.

They will be joined by poet, critic and translator André Naffis-Sahely, currently visiting teaching fellow at Manchester Met’s Writing School, where he is delivering a poetry workshop on 22 January along with a guest lecture about the work of Robinson Jeffers at No 70 on 23 January. Busy man, he’s also poetry editor of Ambit magazine and his own poetry has appeared in PN Review (of course!), Poetry London, The Warwick Review and The International Literary Quarterly. His first collection of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life, came out in 2017 with Penguin UK.

Although the event is free, please note that tickets will be required, as places are limited. Please also note that artworks in the current Castlefield show contain mushrooms and visitors with related allergies or respiratory conditions are advised that spores may be present.