Selected Contributors:

Alison Brackenbury’s Bricks and Ballads is out now from Carcanet. Her poems have appeared widely in newspapers and magazines and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Read more at www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk

Mark Haddon won numerous awards for his bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, including Whitbread Book of the Year. His poems have been published in Poetry London, The Reader, Poetry and Audience and the Evening Standard.

Peter Redgrove died in June 2003 and his ashes were scatter in the sea off Maenporth Beach in Cornwall. A posthumous volume of poems, Sheen, appeared in November 2003 from Stride, and a further volume, The Harper, is in preparation. He was awarded the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996.

Paula Rego has had solo exhibitions of painting and prints in Portugal, the UK, the United States, Brazil, Spain, Denmark and many other countries. A retrospective of her prints will be held at the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh from August 6 till September 24 and then move to other cities around the UK.

Penelope Shuttle’s most recent volume of poems is A Leaf out of his Book, from OxfordPoets/Carcanet, 1999, and was a PBS Recommendation. A new book of poems, Redgrove’s Wife, is in preparation and will appear in 2006. She is a member of Lapidus, and a founder-member of the Falmouth Poetry Group.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov was born in Vologda in 1907 and died in Moscow in 1982. 'The Duck' is part of the Kolyma Tales, an epick cycle of stories based on his experiences in Kolyma, the vast labour-camp empire in North-East Siberia where Shalamov was imprisoned between 1937 and 1956.

order back issue