You can buy Leeds Playhouse, A Tale of Two Theatres here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Leeds Playhouse, A Tale of Two Theatres
by Dave Stannard

The book
This captivating book blends personal anecdotes, in-depth research and behind-the-scenes stories to take readers on a comprehensive journey through the history and transformation of one of Yorkshire’s most acclaimed cultural institutions. 

Dave Stannard’s compelling storytelling, grounded in his meticulous research, reveals the struggles, political wranglings and triumphs that have shaped the Leeds Playhouse over five decades, starting with the idealistic vision of a few individuals who dreamed of a ‘people’s theatre’. From its humble beginnings in temporary accommodation to its evolution into the West Yorkshire Playhouse, and then into the newly revamped Leeds Playhouse, Dave Stannard offers a fascinating insight into the theatre’s past and present, and points to its potential futures.

Whether you’re a history buff, an arts ideologue or simply curious about the evolution of a beloved institution, this book is a must-read. Embark on an enthralling journey and discover the enduring legacy of this iconic theatre.

The writer
Dave Stannard’s first memory of going to the theatre was when, as a boy, he queued up with his parents outside the New Theatre (now Noel Coward Theatre) in London’s West End. This started Dave’s love of theatre which has continued ever since. Throughout his career as a teacher and youth worker, Dave organized countless theatre trips for children and young people, sharing his enthusiasm and inspiring the next generation of theatre lovers.

Dave combines his love for writing and theatre to craft a meticulously researched history of the Leeds Playhouse. Drawing from both thorough research and personal observations, he provides a comprehensive account of the theatre’s evolution. This book is not just a valuable resource for theatre scholars but also an engaging narrative that will captivate anyone interested in the development of the arts in Leeds and West Yorkshire. Dave’s engaging style ensures that this history is accessible and intriguing, offering a vivid portrayal of one of Yorkshire’s most cherished cultural institutions.

Reviews

An extraordinary history of a truly distinguished theatre across its first 50 years. A brilliantly articulate, thoroughly researched and staggeringly detailed story.

How a leading theatre reshapes itself across the years, culturally, architecturally and artistically, in response to the life around it. A must-read for anyone interested in the thrilling and fascinating journey of British Theatre over the last half century.
Michael Attenborough CBE.
Distinguished theatre director and Associate Director of the Leeds Playhouse from 1974 to 1979.

Dave Stannard’s heavyweight history of Leeds – then West Yorkshire, then Leeds again – Playhouse is a comprehensively researched, lightly written canter through six decades or so of planning, preparation, building, rebuilding, performing and producing that reaches far beyond the city’s boundaries to make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the business of theatre.

… a highly enjoyable read
Michael Davies
StageReviews.co.uk

Very best wishes with the book and I look forward to buying it (at The Grove Bookshop in Ilkley) and reading it.
Alan Bennett

Key selling points

    • The only full history of Leeds Playhouse

    • Meticulously researched and with detailed personal knowledge

    • Engaging and readable within an imaginative structure

Buy Leeds Playhouse, A Tale of Two Theatres by Dave Stannard

Category: Non fiction
ISBN: 9781910981306
Paperback
Available worldwide through all good bookshops and online.
Price: £19.99
Number of pages: 470
Release date: 23rd September 2024

You can buy Listening, listening here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Listening, listening
poetry by Bob Cooper

‘turns the ordinary world into an extraordinary book… captivating’
John Gorman

This is Bob Cooper’s third full collection of poems after a five-decade career which has also seen the publication of six pamphlets, some of which have been award-winning. True to form these latest poems deal with ordinary people, a number of whom, in a newly developed theme, have surreal encounters with historical literary figures. Bob’s poems are ironic, funny and poignant with much underlying comment on our times.

If poetry is about voice it is also about listening. Bob writes what he hears in his unique and distinctive style.

The writer
Bob’s poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK and abroad and has been translated into German. As well as poetry he has contributed articles to local and weekly newspapers, and written about fell-running, rock-climbing, and mountaineering for various outdoor journals and magazines.

Bob has won numerous prizes and his poetry has been performed on radio. Over the years, he has read at many Festivals and poetry venues in the UK including the Aldeburgh Festival.

a writer who calls a spade a spade and knows how to dig with it…
Maura Dooley
I love their earthiness, little sinister bits, and all the wisdom, which is not shouted out loud, but thoughtfully hidden in or between the words and lines.
Taru Vuontisjärvi
His particular eye brilliantly gives us the complexity of ‘ordinary’ lives.
Michael Standen
a humane and distinctive voice … Bob Cooper is one of our most individual and impressive poets. He deserves to be widely read.
Peter Bennet
Cooper illuminates the lives of the lonely, the desperate and broken with astounding compassion. In the darkest dirtiest corners of cities, he finds truth and surprising beauty.
Angela Readman
Poems that sparkle with humour and seduce with sadness.
Tim Allen

Buy Listening, listening by Bob Cooper

Category: Poetry
ISBN: 9781910981290
Paperback
Available worldwide though all good bookshops and online.
Price: £9.99
Number of pages: 100
Release date: October 2023

You can buy Dangerous Caprices here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer
Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

Nora Iuga created her title from this half-remembered quotation.

Already at the age of 67 when Iuga brought out this collection, her typical subject-matter of love and sensuality and relationships had extended to include leave-taking and death – as well as language itself. Writing has a redemptive effect, and is sometimes the only way out of despair: her ‘ballpoint pen is equal to god’.

This collection encompasses elements of surreality, captivating the reader with unexpected imagery. There is wistfulness, too, but Iuga is never bitter, and an undertone of irony is ever-present.

Nora Iuga is one of Romania’s most important, productive and original writers and translators. Her poetry in Romanian is accessible; exuberantly life-filled; sensual; sexual.

To date, Iuga has published several novels and fifteen collections of poems including the award-winning Opinii despre durere, ‘Opinions on pain’ (1980). Nora Iuga is also an acclaimed translator of over thirty books by German-language authors. In her long life she has accrued multiple awards in Germany as well as in her homeland where she has achieved national treasure status – Romania’s Grande Dame of literature.

Dangerous Caprices, excellently translated by Adam J Sorkin and Diana Manole, is published by Naked Eye Publishing. You can buy Dangerous Caprices here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Insightful, erotic, morbid, funny and poignant as usual…
Paul B. Roth, The Bitter Oleander Press

The poetics of opposites […] – as carnal as it is original
Jan Wagner, Georg Büchner Award winner

…sensuality of a violent intensity […] reminiscent of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell
Mircea Cărtărescu

Category: Poetry
ISBN: 9781910981283
Paperback
Available worldwide though all good bookshops and online.
Price: £9.99
Number of pages: 120
Release date: 20th February 2023

You can buy Being The One here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Being The One
poetry by
Sarah Littlefeather Demick

“My intention in sharing this with you is that you understand a little better. And if you understand a little better you might want to, or be able to, respond a little more confidently to people in your community who experience life in a different way from you. This is my experience. And as a reader, you are my witness.”

The poems in this collection are mainly born of the poet’s one-to-one work with people who have dementia and who typically live in social isolation or confinement. From poems that are tragic, funny, heart-rending and absurdist, describing the ‘realities’ in which Sarah’s charges live – tragic, funny, heart-rending, and absurdist – the collection moves on to poems about her own reality, emotions and spirituality, and the challenges of being the one who is seen as ‘carer’.

in her mind
time is on a loop
and it was quiet
when she asked me
the question
is he dead?
yes, i replied
is it permanent?

again, there was silence
enough to hear hair grow

Sarah Littlefeather Demick is an Ojibwa Indian who was born in Canada and raised in the UK by adoptive English parents. She lives on a farm in Cumbria.

“her poetry is completely unique – very lyrical but often unsettling”
Kim Moore writing about Sarah’s previous collection.
.

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here.

You can buy The social decline of the oystercatcher here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Passionate, painful, witty, loving, long-sighted

Sue Vickerman’s eerily prophetic poems describe Nature and the old normal before flood and famine, wildfires and too-close war. Scottish landscapes, seabirds and fresh air provide the setting for innocuous pre-pandemic behaviours: beach-combing, bird-watching, bickering. But the breeze blowing through this volume carries a prescient whiff of decay – an uncanny foretelling of what has come to pass.
The natural world is shifting, changing, not ‘normal’ at all. Everywhere there are portents: the rotting stomach of the boat dragged from the lake; the disused nests that bring down the tree; the oystercatcher’s social decline – it seems even seabirds are in retreat ‘from the encroaching edge of the sea’.
Nowadays all are aware that Nature is the treasure we are losing. These poems from the turn of the millenium are full of foreboding – but who among us did not see the writing on the wall?

This new edition of the second of Sue Vickerman’s five poetry volumes has been revised for current times.

A breathless, breathtaking collection, nature au naturel: poetry refracted in the prism of her beacon eye, as effortless as a fulmar’s flight… Birds given tongue and tangy taste… This riotous palette of colourful, heartfelt, sharply poignant, piercingly topical experience [is] a glorious achievement.
the late Magnus Magnusson

…poems [that] remind those of us who write only in lists how much we need rhythm in our lives… A reminder of what really matters in this hectic world.
Sandi Toksvig

This is passionate, laconic poetry of a distinguished kind. Vickerman is best at the very exact landscape poetry which suggests, and sometimes defines, the emotions with which it is associated. But her versatility is such that she is also brilliant at interiors, like ‘Tate Gallery, Turner’s unfinished room’, aural events (‘Hearing about John Lennon’) and even that bizarre thing student life (‘The rise of the rock dove’). The bird poems need reading and re-reading; the empathy is acute, but don’t let that put you off – these poems aren’t really about birds. And yet they are. Painful, witty, loving, long-sighted – I seem to be running out of adjectives. And no wonder.
the late U.A. Fanthorpe

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here.

You can buy The day that didn’t happen here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

The book
A small Norwegian town in August 1975. A heatwave. A 12-year-old girl, who is no longer a child. An incident that no one must know about. A dark secret – and an extraordinary love story.
As an adult, and apparently for the first time, Margrete shares the terrible truth of what happened when she was assaulted at a fairground in her childhood. Having grown up alone with a distant mother, she movingly describes the close bond she had with her grandfather and the one other person that truly saw her – a policeman who moves in across the hall. While providing the love she craves in the form of cocoa and company, Erling instinctively understands Margrete’s anguish.
How she comes to terms with the incident becomes the focus of Margrete’s reflections as she dwells not only on events and relationships, but also on the interplay of heat, light, smells and seasons. Margrete’s fragmented and haunting narrative is ultimately a powerful story of survival and acceptance – both of herself and her mother’s love.

The author:
Gerd Kvanvig was born in 1965 and grew up in Jessheim, near Oslo. Having decided her future lay in writing rather than ballet, she made her literary debut in 1994 with a poetry collection called Persona. As well as being an author, Gerd Kvanvig teaches Norwegian at Jessheim Upper Secondary School. She now lives in Oslo.

The book is translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen.

Reviews:
The Day that Didn’t Happen is a poetic, evocative text … Beautiful images are modified and repeated. …in which grief and song are identical, in which style and language and structure combine so decisively to create meaning. I don’t think I have entered a young girl’s mind and experienced the dangers so intensely since I read The Lover by Marguerite Duras. It is hard to give any greater praise than that.
Professor Hans H. Skei in Aftenposten
…intelligent and wise. The novel is written with empathy, and the writing is sensitive and atmospheric.
Kjersti Borgen Reisop in Romerikes Blad
The plot … resembles a crime novel. It tells the story of what happened at the Jessheim Festival bit by bit, allowing the reader to suspect things by means of a taut and reticent style.
Kristine Sele in Haugesunds Avis

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here.

You can buy The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

a monologue by Darina Al Joundi
translated by Helen Vassallo

‘A stunning manifesto for freedom’ Zybeline

Noun, the heroine of The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing, has left Lebanon to make a life for herself in Paris. Marseillaise My Way follows Noun’s adventures as she flees her home country and arrives in France, a place she believes to be the most secular country in the world, only to find her freedom threatened there too by soul-destroying red tape and the reality of cultural segregation. After having survived civil war, drug addiction, violent assaults, and enforced incarceration in a mental asylum, Noun embarks on a new struggle: to obtain French citizenship. To the refrain of ‘La Marseillaise’, which she has learnt by heart for her citizenship test, Noun pursues her quest for a new life, calling into question the secular foundations of her new home and paying homage to women freedom fighters from across the Arab world.
A bittersweet tragi-comedy La Théâtrothèque
A beautiful piece, necessary for our times, our politics and our humanity Inferno magazine.
Anyone who remembers The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing will make a date with Marseillaise My Way Le Monde

Darina Al Joundi is a critically acclaimed actor and writer of Lebanese-Syrian origin. The daughter of notorious Syrian journalist, freedom fighter, political activist and exile Assim Al Joundi, Darina Al Joundi is known throughout the Arab world for her television and film roles, and has also played occasional roles in popular English-language series such as Homeland and Tyrants.

Al Joundi is also co-author with Mohamed Kacimi of a novel-length version of The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing (Actes Sud 2008), translated by Marjolijn de Jager (Feminist Press, 2010), and author of Prisonnière du levant (Grasset 2017), a fictional biography of feminist pioneer May Ziadeh which is currently being adapted into a film.

Available worldwide online and from bookshops.
You can buy it from Blackwell’s here with free delivery worldwide.

You can buy Always Too Many Miles here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

The poems in Jean Stevens’ latest collection range from long held memories: who is this girl running

towards me out of the past to present day concerns in a time of uncertainty when loved ones are far away: knowing I might never see you again, I’m deep in how it was then.

There is also regret for things missed: You should have been a sprinter, and a reflection on: the jumbled bones of the lives we used to live. 

The poem ‘2021’ takes a darker look at the present turmoil and the feeling that we are: pushing the world to hell, but there is also hope: There was mystery and longing in the ancient call to prayer which made us believe that nothing separates us from the other side, and the feeling all returning travellers have: looking ahead for the light that will bring them home.

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here.

A new English translation by Christina Les of Kathrin Schmidt’s prize winning novel Du Stirbst Nicht 

You can buy You’re not dying here with free worldwide delivery from Blackwell’s.

Helene Wesendahl wakes from a post-aneuryism coma paralysed, speechless and devoid of memory. With each re-learned movement, remembered word and returned fragment of forgotten biography, a life comes to light that she scarcely recognises, confronting her with a strange woman who was once herself. Through the awakening heroine’s eyes, we observe her own body (which seems to lead a life of its own as it laboriously undergoes rehabilitation), her fellow-patients, nurses and doctors, the reactions of a complicated family, and the sacrificial commitment of her husband. Helene’s crisis deepens with the gradual realisation that, owing to a passion for a mysterious woman, she was intending to leave this man who now cares so much …

In 2002, halfway through her award-winning career as a writer, Kathrin Schmidt had a stroke and lost her language. You’re not dying is a tale of recovery based on true experience, all the more astonishing for its stylistically dazzling linguistic facility. ‘Kathrin Schmidt is back. Rejoice!’ Wrote Vladimir Balzer in Die Welt. The difficult experience of illness becomes added to Schmidt’s hallmark themes of love, the body, gender and genealogy, historiography and memory.

In 2009 You’re not dying was the triumphant winner of the German Book Prize, pipping to the post the recent Nobel Prize-winner Hertha Muller, who was also shortlisted. Schmidt’s writing career is littered with multiple prestigious prizes for both her poetry and prose.

Schmidt’s writings are framed by her politics. She co-edited a feminist journal in East Berlin in the early years of the united Germany, and represented the United Left faction at round-table discussions at the time of reunification. Before becoming a writer she trained as a psychologist.

• translated into 13 languages – now, at last, into English!
• voted Best Book by German radio & TV platform SWR

A haunting book. […] Kathrin Schmidt is back. We can rejoice! Vladimir Balzer, Die Welt

An outstanding, true novel Meike Fessmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung

a stylistically dazzling book Alexander Riebel, Die Tagespost

A great novel about illness, language and identity […] Kathrin Schmidt is one of the most important authors of her generation in Germany. Literaturen

…gets under your skin Helmut Böttiger, Die Zeit Online

Once again, Kathrin Schmidt proves to be a narrative virtuoso Der Spiegel Online

Breathtakingly accurate, Kathrin Schmidt paints the tedious path back into human existence. Neue Zürcher Zeitung

A compelling novel Michael Opitz, Deutschland Radio

a zinger, a humdinger, a fabulous shock of a novel Katie Derbyshire

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

More about Kathrin Schmidt

The poems in Jean Stevens’ latest collection are reflections on our relationship with the earth. They express delight in nature but also lament its loss in the uncertain times in which we live.

There is a longing for more connection: that night in my cage of sleep I dreamt of hares in the wild; and a wish to explore the edgelands between the wild and the tame: something unknown is there in the space.

Other poems express a foreboding that is at times apocalyptic: for three days now there have been no birds. Sometimes the tone is biblical: a voice came out of the mountain. A child’s innocence throws out a lifeline of hope: Maddie’s in touch with the earth, Maddie is running free.

A timely plea for us all to speak to the earth.

These are searching, restless poems, haunted by both darkness and light, by how we damage the earth and how we are forever connected to it.  Their yearning for what is tender within us as well as what is wild is both a surprise and a delight.
Kim Moore

Persuasive and deeply moving
The Yorkshire Times

For Jean Stevens, love, grief, elegy, longing are insuperable states of mind, as natural as the taking of measured breaths

Stevens’ relationship with landscape is existentially-charged, and in Speak to the Earth – a message of love and nourishment to the visible universe – she offers a fitting libation to a natural world which continues to give her comfort in times of retreat and contemplation.
Steve Whitaker

Jean Stevens’ previous poetry collections have been warmly received.

Filmic and beautiful, full of warmth and drama
     Kay Mellor OBE
An exciting contemporary voice
     Daljit Nagra
Persuasive and deeply moving
     The Yorkshire Times
A sure hand
     Ian McMillan

This new collection could possibly be her best yet.

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

Naked Eye is pleased to publish Jean’s latest collection of poems Driving in the Dark in February 2018.

The poems in Jean Stevens’ latest collection range through everything from a pub on the North York Moors on a black cloaked night, an encounter with a stranger in the dead hours in Soho and jackdaws who come mob-handed, to a reflection on Elisabeth Frink’s ‘The Walking Madonna’, an accident on black ice, a muddy quad bike, and a meeting with Beethoven in Burnley.

Among poems inspired by her Yorkshire Dales home (I’ve fallen in love with the bones of this place … where wind meets wind) are accounts of late love – when you’ve lost your hair, your waistline, your hearing, and your sweating stains the bed, and of quietly desolate loss: I thought I saw and heard you…

This is a body of work with a beating heart.

“Jean’s poetry is really moving. It is filmic and beautiful, full of warmth and drama.”
Kay Mellor OBE

“Persuasive and deeply moving. Jean Stevens’ great poetic gift is insight. She affords the reader a window on the transcendent.”
Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times

“I really enjoyed reading the whole of ‘Driving in the Dark’ and would really recommend it. I started reading it one afternoon and couldn’t put it down.”
Kim Moore

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

Read more about Jean Stevens here.

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Sue Vickerman has received three Arts Council (UK) awards for her poetry, novels and short stories. Shag, the first of her four poetry collections to date, was published during the half-decade she spent living in a Scottish lighthouse. This is a new Naked Eye edition.

‘Keenly observed birds punctuate the poems in this collection – all strong, straight-talking narratives. They are windows on worlds where various degrees of unsatisfactoriness are revealed. Birds or worlds, the essential mode is “watching” and Sue Vickerman’s gaze is uncompromising, direct and wide-ranging; her language dense and gritty, at home on the edge of things.’
Linda France, editor ‘Sixty Women Poets’ (Bloodaxe)

‘Edgy, elemental, tender, [these poems] help me to understand more about what it is I’m doing, being human.’
Subhadassi

‘Sue Vickerman’s poems are always aware of the elemental picture behind the detail, of earth, air, sea and fire. They are salty, stony, fierce, loving, and sometimes sharp. These are poems that will ruffle your feathers, full of acute glimpses of the underneath of things.’
The late Julia Darling

Buy it with free delivery worldwide from Blackwell’s here. Otherwise online or from all good bookshops.

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