Digital Interaction Design embraces one of the smallest groups of students in this year’s Final Year Degree Show, but their work is sure to exert an enormous impact on the design world of the future. The atmosphere on entering the building and meeting up with the helpful and professional Joanna Helfer of the Art and Read More
Polyzoa; sessile aquatic animals forming mossy colonies of small polyps each having a curved or circular ridge bearing tentacles; they attach to stones or seaweed, are filter feeders, and reproduce by budding. She looks up from her book. This new girl’s raised arm is the colour of Miss Jelly’s leather-bound volume of the complete works Read More
With Autumn, Ali Smith has written a work of such layered ingenuity that I’ve placed a bet on it to win the Booker. Smith, who has an enviable awards pedigree to her name – winner of the Whitbread, Baileys, Costa and Goldsmiths prizes and twice previously Booker-nominated, is one of those rare authors whose published Read More
Sonja, the protagonist in Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, is a Danish translator who is working on a series of Swedish crime fiction novels. She is “over forty” and appears to have reached a midlife crisis when the novel begins. She decides to learn to drive, despite suffering from a form of inherited positional vertigo which can Read More
The three collections encapsulated in Love is a place – It wasn’t far away or difficult (2010), The signal is fading (2012) and From where to begin to love again (2014) have been translated from Catalan to English by Anna Crowe, a skilled veteran of poetry in translation. Joan Margarit is an award-winning poet who Read More
This debut work of non-fiction has already received widespread critical acclaim – this year, it was shortlisted for the Wellcome Prize, and won the Wainwright Golden Beer Prize. As The Outrun is a memoir of Liptrot’s slide into alcoholism, and her efforts to remain sober by returning to the place of her birth and raising, Read More
Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband/Saraband, 2015); pbk, £8.99 His Bloody Project, is not only the title of this novel, (a work of fiction constructed to give the appearance of a factual account), it is also the title of a sensationalist chapbook referred to later in the novel, based on the memoir of our unreliable narrator and Read More
Jan Wagner, translated by Iain Galbraith (Arc Publications, 2015); pbk, £10.99 In his introduction to this collection, Iain Galbraith notes that “a poem, we might hazard, is a highly sophisticated instrument for the measurement of, and ingress to, the real in all its dimensions.” This maxim exudes aptness, especially when applied to the wonderful variety Read More
A creative project such as VERSschmuggel, of which this book is the offspring, is a remarkable thing. Funded by Literaturwerkstatt Berlin for the 2014 Berlin Poetry Festival, four Scottish and two Scotland-based poets spent time in Berlin with six German counterparts. With considerable assistance from translators, they paired to transform each other’s work into an Read More
Valerie Laws, in the title pages of this poetry collection, is described as “Poet, crime novelist, performer, playwright, Writer-in Residence at science institutes, sci-art installation specialist, mathematician.” Phew! Like many other writers and artists, Laws clearly has her fingers in many different creative pies; this is very much in evidence in the varied subject matter Read More
