Out-Spoken Press, Spread the Word and New Writing North announce the three emerging poets — Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell, Ian Irwin and Cat Turhan — selected as mentees of their inaugural mentorship and development programme offering targeted, integrated support, craft and professional development resources over the course of a year aiming to ready them for publication.
Launched last December, the programme offers three mentorship places: the first, Pywell, to a writer living in the North of England was selected in conjunction with the Northern Writers’ Awards by Helen Mort and publisher and T.S Eliot-prize-shortlisted poet Anthony Anaxagorou. The remaining two writers from the rest of the UK, Irwin and Turhan, were selected by Forward Prize-winning poet Mona Arshi and Anaxagorou.
The three mentees will be offered a broad range of support including regular one-to-one craft mentoring sessions, facilitation of critical feedback group formation, craft workshops, and sessions on professional development and navigating the industry, aimed at readying work for publication and creating a meaningful practical opportunity to open up access to what to many still feels like a ‘closed shop’ sector.
Out-Spoken founder and Managing Editor Anthony Anaxagorou says “I’m thrilled to be working with these three incredible poets whose work seems to be pushing form and thought while also being totally invested in language. ”
This continues Out-Spoken Press’s vocal commitment to ethically fostering emerging poetry talent.
The Press, shortlisted for Small Press of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2020, 2021 and 2022, was recently awarded Arts Council England funding to pursue this. Since its founding in 2014, Out-Spoken Press has focused on platforming diverse new voices, particularly through early-career support of writers who have gone on to more mainstream success, including Joelle Taylor, Raymond Antrobus, Sabrina Mahfouz, and Harry Josephine Giles.
About the poets
Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell is a poet living in York. She has been published in journals such as Fourteen Poems, Impossible Archetype and Dreich, and her first pamphlet, Unknown, was co-written with fellow York poet, Anna Rose James, and published in 2021. Her second pamphlet, Breaking (Out), about re-examining sexuality in middle age, was published in 2022 by Selcouth Station Press. She is currently working on a collection about womanhood, ancestry and landscape
Ian Irwin is a poet and educator who lives and works in Bristol. Originally from the Essex side of the Thames Estuary, he has been performing and writing poetry in the city for several years.
Cat Turhan is a poet based in North London. Her work has been published in various magazines including The Rialto, Anthropocene, Butcher’s Dog, Ink Sweat and Tears, Bath Magg and Under the Radar. She was the winner of the 2021 Waltham Forest Competition.
Published 11 July 2022