We are delighted to announce the publication of PENning Water, the fifth issue of New Writing, Scottish PEN's on-line magazine, and to welcome as our featured writer Aminatta Forna. Aminatta, a novelist born in Scotland and raised in West Africa, will be known to Scottish PEN readers as one of the two writers who contributed to the lively discussion at the PEN Lecture at the Edinburgh International Festival this year. In ‘Love Stories’, she tells what has inspired creative writers in Sierra Leone as the country recovers from war.
Water proved an inspirational subject for our own Scottish-based contributors - who in this issue come from places as diverse as Scotland, Zimbabwe, Shetland, Pakistan, Congo, Syria, and Sri Lanka. Our latest issue takes a journey through watery celebrations, transformations, memories and fears in poetry and prose. We were delighted with the response - 29 submissions in all, from which we have selected 17, giving priority as usual to those from immigrant writers, including some for whom writing in English is a new activity alongside experienced practitioners.
Water is a universal theme and, varied as the submissions were, many of them played off each other, like light on water. Linda Cracknell, who has professional experience of editing themed anthologies, has arranged the poems to reflect (in every sense) the interplay of subject and mood - a departure from our usual alphabetical order which we hope will enhance your pleasure in the collection. You will find here pieces on monsoon and drought, fetching water and walking in rain, rivers and oases and - naturally from writers living in a country where the coast is never very far away - the sea. Immerse yourselves!
Anne Clarke, Linda Cracknell, Lindsey Fraser, Fiona Graham
Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova was born and raised in Communist Bulgaria and emigrated to New Zealand with her family as a teenager in the early 1990s. She graduated from Sofia’s French College and two New Zealand universities, and in 2005 she moved to Scotland. Kapka is the author of the childhood memoir Street Without a Name (Portobello 2008) and the poetry collections Someone else’s life and Geography for the Lost (Bloodaxe). She was twice the recipient of the Cathay Pacific Travel Writer of the Year award in New Zealand for travel journalism, and has penned the odd travel guide. Her novel Villa Pacifica (Alma Books, 2011) is set in South America, and her new travel memoir Twelve Minutes of Love (Portobello, 2011) is about the Argentine tango as a way of life. She lives between Edinburgh and the Highlands, teaches at Strathclyde University, and writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Scottish Review of Books, and Vogue.