With the festive season in full swing and 2020 nearly upon us, here at New Writing North we’ve been getting nostalgic and looking back through our book shelves to pick out some of our favourite reads of this year. Get cosy whilst you scroll through our Books of the Year 2019.
The Poetry Book Society has been inspiring generations of poets and poetry fans since 1953. In 2016 they moved to Newcastle to join Inpress and have continued to promote the fantastic work of both established and emerging poets worldwide. In this guest blog, they share their Poetry Book Society Gift Guide, full of festive favourites with a Northern twist, and 10% off for Northern Bookshelf readers.
Waterstones Bookshop Durham is perfectly placed right at the heart of Durham's beautiful city centre, with walks along the river Wear and the iconic Durham Cathedral just a stone's throw from their doorstep. In this guest feature post, staff members Kat and Fiona share with us some of the books they’re really excited about at the moment.
Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatised and sickened selves in fiction and film. In this interview, Jenn Ashworth, tells us about the inspiration behind her book, the difficult subjects which it covers, and taking on a different style of novel.
Recovery Songs is published by Valley Press in October 2019. Here writer Ralph Dartford tells us how the collection was made.
Laura Lindow is the writer and director of Stitched: A Hip-Hopera, a musical theatre production co-created with young people from New Writing North's Young Writers' City programme. In this blog post, she describes the impart the project had on her own work.
ABC is a book group based in Leeds. It’s been meeting for 21 years, since the group's children were at primary school together. They still meet every 6 weeks or so, each taking it in turn to host the meeting in their home. In this post, Julie and Carol tell us about some of their favourite reads over the years.
In this interview, Northern Writers’ Awards winner and this year's Durham Book Festival guest Okechukwu Nzelu, talks about his new book The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney. He discusses coming of age experiences, his Northern roots and his motivation to tell stories such as Nnenna's.
Neil Astley founded Bloodaxe Books in 1978 to give a platform to emerging new poets, many from the North of England. Over four decades it has revolutionised poetry publishing: challenging the male Oxbridge domination of poetry in the 80s, and later taking contemporary poetry to a much broader readership. Renowned for quality and diversity, Bloodaxe has been a pioneering publisher of women poets and BAME writers.
The Poetry Book Society is a unique poetry book club, founded by T.S. Eliot and based in Newcastle. Every quarter their selectors choose the best new poetry collections to deliver to their members alongside the PBS Bulletin magazine full of poems, interviews, reviews and offers. See what their Autumn picks are in their guest blog for us.
Founded in Newcastle Gateshead in 2016, Curious Arts celebrates and explores Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture through the arts. In this guest blog post, find out about their current projects as well as the children's books that they'd love to bring to the stage!
Plackitt & Booth Booksellers Ltd are a super successful indie bookshop made up of husband and wife team Alison Plackitt and Patrick Booth. They've been running high profile author events and serving the good folk of Lytham, Lancashire for the last 18 years. Find out about what they've been up to and the books that they're loving at the moment.
