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This week, for her WRITERS CHAT series, Sarah Gilligan talks to author Sarah Broughton about her recent release Brando's Bride. You say several times in the book that Anna Kashfi was “both of her time and one of a kind” and that she was “a part of history and yet also extinguished from it.” Was part of your aim in writing this book to bring her – and her story – back into the folds of history and also popular culture? Did you see her as one of the forgotten women of history? This is an area I’ve always been...

And another great review! This time for Pomegranate Garden by Haydar Ergülen on World Literature Today: 'Ergülen has a broad poetic range. Pomegranate Garden features works from 1982 to 2019. Pomegranate Garden delights in prose poetry, symbolism, free verse, narrative, premodern classicism, and the occasional mystic spiritual. But arguably, Ergülen best succeeds at what Parker notes as his “down-to-earth concerns of humanity itself.” In his poem “Borrowed Like Sorrow” (2005), he writes, “Mornings are tough / much more so than poetry.” His quotidian commentary becomes profound in his elegy to the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, written the year he was assassinated....

'In Jill Piercy, Chamberlain has found a sensitive and respectful biographer whose principal strength is the enlightening discussion of the visual art [...] This portrait of a gifted, sometimes tortured woman will hopefully encourage people to seek out books such as ‘Tide-race’ and ‘A Rope of Vines’ which are both reasonably accessible. But seek out too her paintings and engravings, as here was a true artist, complex and compelling, a writer who paints with words just as her paintings and colourful linocuts sing of a woman ferociously and tenaciously engaged with the world.' Jon Gower reviews the new Modern Wales...

FoxNews Entertainment have published their interview with Sarah Broughton, author of 'Brando's Bride'. "Sarah Broughton was eager to find out what happened to Anna Kashfi, a Hollywood starlet who became Brando's first bride and who was plagued by scandal, and then disappeared. But she never expected to speak with the actress face-to-face. Their conversations are the basis of the author’s book titled 'Brando's Bride', which details Kashfi's rise to stardom, her stormy marriage to the Hollywood icon, a public downfall and her mysterious final years. Kashfi passed away in 2015 at age 80 from natural causes." Read the full interview here

Happy New Year all!

It is lovely to see this very positive review of Notes from a Swing State by Zoë Brigley on our return to the office! Thanks to Sue Mackrell for writing it!

“She refuses to believe that violence is inevitable and works to challenge violence, hate crimes and discrimination against anyone who does not conform to a supposed ‘norm.’ She believes at the root of it all is a breakdown of communication, ‘an act of violent refusal' to recognise the humanity and to empathise with an individual perceived as ‘different.’”