Arts Council England boosts its support for Bloodaxe Books
Everyone at Bloodaxe Books is delighted that Arts Council England has not only approved the continuation of our grant for the next three years but also an uplift to support our diversity initiatives. Like many National Portfolio Organisations supported by the Arts Council, Bloodaxe has had standstill funding for the past ten years, unable to develop projects designed to make an even greater contribution to diversity in poetry than our already inclusive programming provides.
Among the projects now supported thanks to the Arts Council's #LetsCreate investment programme will be the James Berry Poetry Prize. The inaugural prize launched last year was a pilot project run in partnership with NCLA (Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts) which received an ACE project funding to support the development and publication of young or emerging poets of colour. Three equal winners receive mentoring towards first book publication by Bloodaxe, with those from 2021 published in 2023 and 2024. Kaycee Hill's debut collection Hot Sauce and Marjorie Lotfi's The Wrong Person to Ask will both be published in October 2023, followed by Yvette Siegert's debut in 2024.
The prize was the idea of diversity specialist Nathalie Teitler and Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, whose own debut poetry collection Lara is published by Bloodaxe. The judges of the inaugural prize were Neil Astley, Sinéad Morrissey, Theresa Muñoz, Jacob Sam-La Rose and Nathalie Teitler, and the mentors were Mona Arshi, Malika Booker and Mimi Khalvati. The prize is named in honour of James Berry, OBE (1927-2017), one of the first Black writers in Britain to receive wider recognition, whose books include Windrush Songs and A Story I Am In from Bloodaxe. Now we will now be able to run the James Berry Poetry Prize every three years.
The other area covered by the uplift is a new series of inclusive and international anthologies, including two in 2023.
Edited by Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf, Mapping the Future: The Complete Works Poets presents new work and essays exploring how poetry has become much more inclusive in Britain over the past 15 years: what has been won, and what is still being fought for. Developed from the work of The Complete Works collective of Global Majority poets directed by Nathalie Teitler, this historic anthology – published in October 2023 – will become a seminal text in education and cultural development, marking a moment of change in British poetry and recording a vibrant new poetry movement at the forefront of this change.
Out of Sri Lanka is the first-ever anthology of Sri Lankan (and diasporic) poetry, featuring poets writing in English and translated from Sinhala and Tamil, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett. We are grateful for additional financial support for this project from Harvard University where Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches. This book is published in June 2023.
At the same time Bloodaxe's publishing programme in 2023 will continue introduce readers to a wider diversity of poets from around the world. One highlight will be the publication in September of Nicole Sealey's The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an extract from which won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poems in 2021, coupled with the first UK release of her first collection Ordinary Beast.
As well as the two ground-breaking anthologies, the 2023 programme features 22 titles by individual poets, including 15 by women poets, one of these being the 2022 winner of the Mslexia Women's Pamphlet Competition, judged now by Imtiaz Dharker. Two are posthumously published: Anne Stevenson's Collected Poems and Carole Satyamurti's final collection, The Hopeful Hat, which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. There are four first collections and two translations. For full details of the 2023 programme please click on this link.
Bloodaxe's diversity initiative will continue in 2024-26 with the publication of a series of three pan-European multilingual anthologies featuring Black, Persian and Arabic poets now living – in some cases exiled – in different European countries, extending the Kontinentaldrift project established by Haus für Poesie in Berlin. We are hoping that the support given to the original Kontinentaldrift project in Europe will be matched by festivals and media in Britain and Ireland.
[04 November 2022]
