Creative duo celebrate published works

Students saw another side to their creative writing lecturers last night as they celebrated a number of their books being published during a special event.

Listen to the successful duo read from their collections and explain the thinking behind their work before they took to the stage to do the reading and question and answer sessions with their guests.

Professor Robert Sheppard and Senior Lecturer Daniele Pantano, who both teach Creative Writing within the English and History Department at Edge Hill, have published four books and two pamphlets between them in the last few months. They were eager to showcase to students and guests that they don't just teach the subject but are professional writers so decided to host a reading session to mark their achievements.

Professor Robert Sheppard is Programme Leader of the MA Creative Writing course and has published a new book of poems, Berlin Bursts. Themes covered include the troubled history of Berlin, Riga and other places ravaged through time. There are poems about poems and a sequence about the doomed attempt to create a hologram poet. His critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry is a history of alternative British poetry and deals with major figures like Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth and Maggie O'Sullivan.

Senior Lecturer Daniele Pantano is the Programme Leader for the BA Creative Writing programme and has published The Oldest Hands in the World, a book of poems about exile, translingualism and writing his way home. His other book, The Possible Is Monstrous, is a collection of poems in English translation by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who is seen not only as the most prominent Swiss novelist, playwright and essayist of the twentieth century but as one of the most influential authors of modern literature.

They both also have pamphlets out from the enterprising Knives Forks and Spoons Press.  Robert's book, The Given, is an anti-autobiography, telling his life via events in his diary he cannot remember and others that he'd rather forget. Daniele's book, Mass Graves (XIX-XXII), is an excerpt from a new collection of poems he is currently writing that examines the lives, events and connections between an unknown Swiss poet and the savage murder of one of Egon Schiele's young girls.