At The City’s Edge Blog

I was really chuffed to be invited onto Mab Jones’s blog: At The City’s Edge: The Wetlands of Wales, Episode 2.

At the City’s Edge: The Wetlands of Wales is a podcast of poems, stories, discovery, discussion, music and sound art exploring the importance of the Welsh wetlands, which are now under threat.

I was Mab’s guest for the episode along with Benjamin Marriott.

The episode is in honour of all the animals we have lost and is dedicated to Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

Created and hosted by Mab Jones, with support from the Royal Society of Literature and a Literature Matters Award 2019.

The podcast will soon also be available on iTunes and Spotify.

Please follow the hashtag #WelshWetlands for more on FB, Twitter and Insta.

 

Online Writing Course with Mab Jones

This autumn I am delivering an online creative writing course with the wonderful wordsmith Mab Jones.  You can find more out about her here https://mabjones.com/

We are really excited to be running a course on Exploring Voice.  It’s designed to be accessible to writers who are new to writing as well as to those who are experienced.  If you are interested then send an email to: exploringvoice2019@gmail.com

 

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New Book Alert

Punch short story collection out on 4th of March, available to order now.

Whether it’s a man with a growth on his hand, a couple trying for a baby, a woman finishing a book, a pope with penis envy, or a bullied girl, the characters caught in the slipstream world of Punch have no choice but to look again at their surroundings and themselves. Humorous, disturbing, this debut short story collection shows us how strange life in the early twenty-first century is.

“Punch is original and inventive. North finds oddities in the familiar and cruelties in the banal, making these meticulously-crafted stories simultaneously warm and unnerving, sincere and gutsy.”
Rachel Tresize

“Kate North’s short fiction collection is wonderfully weird and uncanny: she can make the ordinary seem strange, and the strange seem ordinary. Carefully crafted and rich with poetic detail, these speculative stories startle and unsettle at every step.”
Tyler Keevil

Order a copy of Punch here

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Book launch 11th October 2018, 7.30pm, The Roath Park Pub

Join us at the Roath Park pub in Cardiff to celebrate the launch of two exciting new books by writers from the city – The Way Out by Kate North and Things that Make the Heart Beat Faster by João Morais. Katherine Stansfield will be our wonderful chair for the poetry session with Kate, while the wonderful Richard Gwyn will chair the short story session with João.

There will be readings and short Q & A sessions. Free Entry. All Welcome. The bar will be open and very affordable and there will be free nibbles on offer and all you vegan, veggie and gluten free folks will be catered for. Failing that, it is on City Road 😉

https://www.facebook.com/events/1949701681787382/
The Way Out offers entertaining, poignant and funny poems. A fresh and contemporary voice addressing the personal, the political, the everyday and the absurd. Kate North’s second collection shows that the only way to harness the future is live one’s choices with assuredness in the present. Sharp observations of addiction, illness and loss rub shoulders with celebrations of the body, exploration of the world and the value of loving relationships.

https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/pre-order/products/the-way-out

João Morais’s contemporary debut collection of stories beats paths through a capital city from street food markets and art galleries to the park and the pub. From illegal raves to prison visits, Morais turns his unflinching beam on the quickened pulse of urban living: spliffs, fights, and hearts spark as relationships and power struggles are tested. Often comic, sometimes tragic, these stories detail the moments in their characters’ lives when everything changes and their hearts beat faster.

https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/new-releases/products/things-that-make-the-heart-beat-faster

New Collection

I’m please to say that my second poetry collection, The Way Out, will be published with Parthian later this year.

 

‘The language is muscular, the voice commanding, while the subject matter considers the cruel joke of mortality through very tangible and physical descriptions. In such a landscape, the body becomes an undiscovered country, relationships are unsteady, and place is viewed as if through a kind of vertigo. Whatever the direction in The Way Out, there is always movement inwards, through, and out in the world.’ – Zoë Brigley

‘The way out of the title isn’t an exit – more like being outbound on a journey. The destination of each poem, whether in another country or at home, in the past or in the body itself, is to be entirely, physically present. As one poem says, “The way out is here.”’ – Philip Gross

‘This inquisitive collection roams into the spaces we can’t reach – the lungs, the liver – and those we think we know: back gardens and parks, the distances between people. The mysteries of the body offer ways into the mysteries of human relationships, and back out again as families mourn and re-make themselves, landscapes invite and consume. A book of transitions, The Way Out is always moving, offering fresh perspectives with wry humour and unsettling angles.’ – Katherine Stansfield

‘a pleasure to hold in mind, sweet and salt with a sharp aftertaste, somewhat disquieting, and more of a pleasure for that.’ – Stephen Payne

 

Latest publications

Here is a list of recent publications from Kate:

Poetry contribution in Poetry Wales. Vol 53 Number 1 pp 54

Poetry contribution in Poetry Salzburg Review. 31 

Short story ‘Houtsiplou’ in: The Lonely Crowd. Issue 6.

Peer reviewed article ‘Exploring Care for Children with Autism in Wales Using Creative Writing as a Research Method in a Collaborative Study’ in: Writing in Practice. Issue 3. http://www.nawe.co.uk/DB/current-wip-edition/articles/exploring-care-for-children-with-autism-in-wales-using-creative-writing-as-a-research-method-in-a-collaborative-pilot-study.html