Andrew McMillan with Annette C. Boehm, Jo Duffy ..

Contact: piccadilly@waterstones.com

Bare Fiction Debut Poetry Collection Prize: Winners' event with special guest Andrew McMillan

This special event at Waterstones Piccadilly store includes the launch of the prize winning collection by Annette C. Boehm 'The Knowledge Weapon', plus the two pamphlets by runners-up Peter Wallis & Jo Duffy, with special guests: Competition judge Andrew McMillan and Bare Fiction poet Zelda Chappel. (Check out our other events on this book tour in Cardiff, Manchester & Birmingham. https://www.facebook.com/BareFiction/events )

Tickets are priced at £5 which can be redeemed against the purchase of any of the poets collections on the night. £5 tickets are available in store, by telephone 020 7851 2400 or by email: piccadilly@waterstones.com

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Winner: Annette C. Boehm

Annette C. Boehm won the Bare Fiction Debut Poetry Collection Competition 2015, as judged by award winning poet Andrew McMillan, with her collection 'The Knowledge Weapon'.

"Open the book on any page and try not to be impressed by the command of language, the dynamism of image, the thrill of subjects which are on offer." Andrew McMillan

"In Annette C. Boehm’s stunning The Knowledge Weapon, false knowledge is inflicted—but quickly finds itself shredded by its own sword. This fierce debut collection explores our baroque relations with one another and with a savaged ecology. Can a book be both ominous and playful, both freeing and disturbing? Read this and know." Angela Ball, Professor of English at The University of Southern Mississippi

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Runners-up: Peter Wallis & Jo Duffy

Articles of Twinship by Peter Wallis

“gorgeous, lyrical and heartbreaking poems of twinship, the body; life as something tentative as well as tender”
Andrew McMillan

Other Troubled Creatures by Jo Duffy
“Remarkable and exciting poems which use the fantastical, and a keen eye for imagery, to examine the hardships and disappointments of everyday life”
Andrew McMillan

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Andrew McMillan

Andrew McMillan was born in South Yorkshire in 1988; his debut collection physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2014 he received a substantial Northern Writers' Award. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University and lives in Manchester.

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Annette C. Boehm

Annette C. Boehm is a graduate of the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Her chapbook The Five Parts of Love - Confabulating Sappho was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2012, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in UK and US journals such as New Welsh Review, Under the Radar, elimae, Chariton Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and others. Her manuscript The Knowledge Weapon was also finalist for the 2015 New Issues Poetry Prize, FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves as a poetry reader for the online journal Memorious.

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Peter Wallis

A former Eastern Arts Association Visiting Writer, and Primary School ‘Poet in Residence’, Peter's poems have been published in the UK, Germany and New Zealand. He is three times winner of the Thetford Open Poetry Competition and has either won or been second in other competitions including the Scottish International, Capricorn International, and Norwich Open.

He has read his work at The Poetry Society, and on Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and has been widely published in magazines.

He is Submissions Editor for the charity “Poems in the Waiting Room”, which produces Britain’s widest circulating poetry periodical.

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Jo Duffy

Jo was born in 1991 in Swindon, and grew up in Marlborough in the Wiltshire countryside. She studied for her BA in English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, graduating with a first in 2013. Now based in Hackney, East London, she works as both a freelance copywriter and language researcher, and focuses on her own writing whenever she has a spare moment. She was longlisted for the Melita Hume Prize in 2015.

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Zelda Chappel

Zelda Chappel’s debut poetry collection 'The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat' was published by Bare Fiction in 2015. Her poetry has also been widely published in both print and online journals with poems appearing in Obsessed with Pipework, Whisker, Eunoia Review, Lunar Poetry, Popshot, Bare Fiction, Prole, Hark Magazine, The Interpreter’s House and Ink, Sweat & Tears amongst many others. In September 2014, her poem Another Twenty, Another Stone won the Battered Moons Poetry Competition, judged by David Morley. Her poetry was also nominated for best single poem in the Forward Prize 2015. Zelda is sub-editor for Elbow Room, an on-going series of art journals and live events. Celebrating art in all guises each volume of Elbow Room is carefully curated to create an individual and cohesive collection. Produced in limited edition, hand bound pamphlets.

Price: £5.00. (£5 (redeemable against purchase))

Time: 7:00pm