New book releases and a prize for St John’s Harper-Wood Students, past and present

A poetry collection, a prose and poetry memoir, and a short story prize are the results of the work from three of St John’s Harper-Wood Students, past and present.

A collection of poetry focusing on the alienation of the expatriate,  a prose and poetry memoir which manages to discuss both literature and problems with tortoises, and a prize for a short story set in a logging camp are the achievements from Harper-Wood Students from both this and previous years – Vahni Capilideo, Will Eaves and Erin Soros.

Vahni Capilideo is the current holder of the Harper-Wood Studentship, Will Eaves held the Studentship in 1994, and Erin Soros was the 2014 Harper-Wood Student. The one-year Harper-Wood Studentship provides a graduate of any British university with the chance to pursue a creative writing project in a country of their choice outside the UK, where they have to carry out their own research and produce a piece of fiction, poetry, or drama.

Vahni Capildeo’s new poetry collection, Measures of Expatriation, was released at the end of January. The book is a collection of poems and prose-poems in which Vahni, born in Trinidad and resident in the UK, discusses the complex alienation of the expatriate as well as focusing on wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society.

“It is a rare and magical-seeming privilege to be able to travel and write,” Vahni said of the Harper-Wood Studentship. The writer has just returned from Trinidad where her research involved apprenticing herself to masqueraders, or traditional carnival characters. “Their ‘sailor dance’ has 19th-century roots and reflects naval presence and habits but in elaborated costumes with African-influenced fancy headpieces; mine was a hummingbird as tall again as I am! I am currently doing a short spell of archival research on a Cambridge woman horticulturist, Chrystabel Procter, who tended Girton's WWII makeover and also created a garden in Uganda. The next step is East Africa in search of traces of her creation, then back to Trinidad to create a site-specific 'sea and land' event bringing together these strands.”

Vahni has published 7 books including No Traveller Returns (2003) and Dark and Unaccustomed Words (2012) which was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

She will be reading at the British Library on 26 February at 6.30pm at the 'Beyond Bounds' event and in Cambridge on 3 March at 7.30pm the Junction 3 at the Poetry of Women (POW!)  event as part of the Women of the World (WOW) Cambridge festival.

Measures of Expatriation can be purchased from Carcanet Press.

Former Harper-Wood Student Will Eaves has just released his book The Inevitable Gift Shop, “a memoir by other means”. This prose and poetry collection brings together themes such as illness, literature, memory, desire, as well as problems with cable ties and tortoises. Described as “heartbreaking and hilarious” by writer Ian Samson and “like a conversation with an extraordinarily wise friend: surprising, tender, funny and profound” by novelist Michelle de Kretser, the book transforms itself from literary criticism to history, and from prose to poetry. He will be reading from his new book on 3 March at Gay’s The Word Bookshop in London at 6.30pm.

Will has written four novels, including The Absent Therapist, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, as well as a collection of poems, Sound Houses. He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1995 to 2011, and now teaches at Warwick University. He used his Harper-Wood Studentship in 1994 to fund a trip to the United States, “ostensibly to investigate millenarian cults and religious belief in the southern states”.

“I’d become interested in various kinds of end-of-days theism, in the wake of the Waco Siege in 1993,” Will said. “My idea was to write a play about the effects on a British household of the arrival, from America, of a fundamentalist evangelical Christian who turns out to be a spokesman for the coming apocalypse – and gay. I’m not sure which bits of that idea seem quaint or prophetic today. I was influenced by the work of Tony Kushner. Anyway, I was unprepared, and nothing came of the piecemeal conversations I wrote down as I roamed Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and New Mexico. Until, nearly twenty years later, I began writing a book of voices – monologues and arguments, rants and raves – and found, to my surprise, that I had an American chapter ready and waiting. The book was The Absent Therapist (2014) and I think of the believers, sceptics, dissenters and New Agers in the central section (“We Are Prey”) as people and characters who trained me to listen. I think that is the key to reading and writing, really. Listening. What you have to say is an extension of what you've heard and what you hear – in the world and on the page.” 

Will’s book The Inevitable Gift Shop can be purchased from CB Editions, as can The Absent Therapist.

Erin Soros, the 2014 Harper-Wood Student, has just been awarded the second prize in the prestigious Costa Short Story Award 2015. The Norwich-based Canadian writer was announced as runner-up in the competition at the end of January with her short and powerful story Fallen, a story set in a logging camp told by the only female living there among the men. A logging accident takes a man’s arm, and the camp gets together to mark the loss.

Erin’s story was one of six shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award. The public was asked to vote for their favourite of six short stories shortlisted by five judges without knowing the authors' identities, after downloading them to read or listen to on the Costa website. Read Fallen here.

Erin’s fiction and non-fiction has been published in international journals and anthologies and her stories have been aired on the CBC and BBC. She won the CBC Literary Award, the 2006 Commonwealth Prize for the Short Story, and was a finalist for the BBC Short Story Award. She was shortlisted twice for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, in 2011 and 2015, and her story Still Water, BC was a finalist for the 2013 Costa Short Story Award.

The Harper-Wood Studentship funded Erin’s travel to research Inuvialuit oral history in the Canadian Arctic, and afterwards she returned to St John’s to do a reading from her novel-in-progress, Hook Tender, set in a British Columbia logging camp.

“The Harper-Wood position provided cherished time to immerse myself in my novel, and the extraordinary opportunity to travel to the Canadian Arctic so I could research the northern environment and cultural background of one of my main characters,” Erin said. “I spent months interviewing Inuvialuit elders about their experiences on the land and their responses to colonial education. These dialogues were life-changing encounters that taught me about collective trauma and the power of oral history to foster a community’s resilience.”

“In the end, my Arctic hosts shared a profound lesson in what it means to welcome a stranger. The journey placed me in history, but also brought me radically into the present, each sensation and experience so new. I saw the first sunrise after five weeks of darkness, drove a truck on an ice road, learned to shoot a rifle with an eight-year old girl, drum danced with Justin Trudeau , heard jokes I can’t repeat here from the first Inuk to work for the CBC, helped the people of Ulukhaktok to harvest a whale, ate muktuk (whale blubber), muskox, caribou, reindeer and dry fish, picked bearberries on the tundra, learned string games in a river camp, heard stories that veered from devastating to inspiring to hilarious, sang hymnals in Inuvialuktun, drove a skidoo across a frozen lake, drank hot chocolate in an igloo, made steaks from a frozen char with a chain saw, carved a bear from alabaster, and danced to ‘Sexy and I Know It’ with an Inuvialuit grandmother.”

Erin has a short story forthcoming on The Weekend Read section of the For Books’ Sake website, a site that champions writing by women; look out for Morning is Vertical on 25 March.

Applications are now open for the Harper-Wood Studentship 2016. For more information and to apply, visit this page.