Hot off the press... I'm thrilled to announce that the Arts Council England have offered me a Grants for the Arts award, to help complete, and secure a publisher for, my debut full collection of poems.
I'll be using the grant to buy the time and space to write two sequences, which sometime visitors to this corner of the net will already know a little about: Kopite Sonnets, commemorating the legendary players of Liverpool Football Club from the '50s to the present day, placing them in the wider social and political history of the time; and The Catch, exploring experiences of clinical depression - stigma and despair; hope and renewal - with the added aim of widening understanding of mental illness. The latter will also include a series of free writing workshops to be held in conjunction with Writing Yorkshire.
Initial poems from the Kopite Sonnets include 'This is Anfield', included in my pamphlet For Real, and 'John Barnes', winner of the Offside Stories: The Pride and the Passion competition last year.
Those from The Catch include the title poem, featured as the Guardian's Saturday Poem last year, and 'Hound', also included in For Real.
Really looking forward to making the most of some invaluable time to write, I hope, exciting and vital new poems for both sequences. Watch this space.