Wayne Holloway-Smith

Wayne Holloway-Smith's second collection Love Minus Love is an internal universe, fragmented and glued back together with uncanny logic. The seemingly fixed boundaries of masculinity, family, trauma and mental health are blurred towards a new type of vinegary identity, in a pitch of emotional intensity that punches you right in the gut.

Love Minus Love

I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE WENDING

Beloved, in Case You've Been Wondering

The mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith's first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which commonsense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. 'A single crow falling from the mind' of the poet is something awkward left at our feet, and the 'air itself' is the voice of skewered unease. The complexities of life are jolted awake throughout this fearlessly inventive debut, as loss arrives played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie, the risk of romance is understood as the filling in a sandwich, and anxieties are found hunkered in bushes, blooming behind the wallpaper, and in the bursting of balloons.

Alarum

Sophie Gainsley

The Best of Wayne Holloway-Smith's Literary Salons

Follow the Trail of Moths

Fiona Sampson

Sam Riviere

Clare Pollard

Polly Clark

George Gömöri

John Mole

Carol Rumens

Attila József

Derek Adams

John McAuliffe

Tom Warner

Anthony Dunn

Jacqueline Gabbitas

Ágnes Lehóczky

Tim Liardet

The Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London launched its new project ‘Inspired by Hungarian poetry: British poets in conversation with Attila József’ in celebration of the Hungarian Culture Day on 22 January 2013. On 22 January 1823 Ferenc Kölcsey – one of the most important literary fi gures in Hungarian history – completed his manuscript of the Hungarian National Anthem. Since 1989 Hungarian culture is celebrated on this day. To mark this special event, the Balassi Institute Hungarian Cultural Centre London invited British poets to contribute to its new project with a poem of their own written in response to the poems of the Hungarian poet Attila József (1905-1937). The original idea of the ‘British poets in conversation with Attila József ’ project came from Tibor Fischer, the internationally renowned British writer of Hungarian origin. The aim of the project is to raise awareness and appreciation of Hungarian poetry among readers in the UK through initiating a poetic conversation between renowned British poets and selected poems of the outstanding Hungarian poet Attila József. The Hungarian Cultural Centre asked British poets to respond to a selection of Attila József’s poems in English translation, put into English beautifully by John Bátki, Edwin Morgan, George Szirtes and Peter Zollman. The present online anthology, published on 11 April 2013 – the birthday of Attila József and the National Poetry Day in Hungary – is the product of the poetic ‘conversation’ between Attila József and more than a dozen of his present-day British counterparts. A gala reading in London on 11 April 2013 celebrates the occasion of the launch of the anthology, Attila József’s work and poetry.

British poets in conversation with Attila József

Inspired by Hungarian poetry

Wayne Holloway-Smith

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