Awen Publications

The Telling is the last of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, set in a galaxy in which numerous planets, including Terra, have been colonised over the millennia by the ancient civilisation of Hain and then have gradually been recontacted to become part of an interstellar community of planets, the Ekumen. This milieu gave Le Guin huge scope to explore in many novels and stories her interests in social structures and comparative ethnography, inspired by her father the anthropolog

Since its first publication in 2015, Arran Stibbe’s Ecolinguistics has been hugely influential in research in this field. The book’s ideas have been further propagated through an online course taken by thousands of people around the world. This second edition has been thoroughly updated in the light of recent research and global events and includes an entire new chapter, on ‘Narratives’. Ecolinguistics is a book with a mission. Stibbe seeks to equip the reader to discern how

Deftly folding in scholarship, historical names, and references without overloading the verse, Kuzminsky traces the 12th-century story of Abelard and Heloise in a series of verse ‘letters’ based on existing letters that the two figures exchanged. Except that Kuzminsky’s stanzas are from Heloise alone. We hear of Abelard through them, not from him. Heloise’s love, her insights, her ambitions, her entreaties, and the events themselves are wrought skilfully into a language tha

What a contrast!! After agreeing to write this blog entry on Irina Kuzminsky’s Heloise Speaks: A Verse Novel, I rushed to my bookshelves to retrieve a translation of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Alas, The Letters proved to be florid, circuitous, and unwieldy. What a joyful deliverance to then read Heloise Speaks! Here Kuzminsky adopts Heloise’s persona and grants her a voice easy for a modern reader to grasp. Heloise du Paraclet begins telling us her story, that of an

Storytelling and Ecology, from Bloomsbury Academic, is my first academic monograph. The writing of it – the second draft in particular – was quite an intense experience, since it coincided with the first five months of the pandemic. The concept of 'lockdown' was for me...

Three years ago I moved back to England (to Trowbridge, Wiltshire) after 24 years of living on the east coast of America. And I am very happy to announce that a new collection of my poems, Labyrinth from Amethyst Press, is out on Kindle and in print. The labyrinth is my psychic journey out of England and into New England, which forced me to expand my understanding of myself, and of the shadow and the gifts of both cultures. The book includes an introductory essay in which I e

'Although nearly all these poems appear in print here for the first time, reading the eight voices included, all strikingly distinct, offers a pervasive sense of united poetic intention. The anthology’s subtitle, ‘Righting the land left’, reflects an earth-centric and regenerative perspective among a group of writers who have regularly met for nearly two decades to share their work, and with whom I too collaborated. The group evolved, as Dr Kevan Manwaring explains in his int

I’ve been aware for a long time how the heroic age of discovery by European explorers, from the late 15th century onwards, raised the curtain for the imperialist conquest and exploitation of the populations and territories of other countries. But ...

In a lecture called ‘Imagining Otherwise’, included in his book Green Man Dreaming (2018), Lindsay Clarke deploys a diagram of two intersecting circles to illustrate the relationship between our inner and outer worlds. The shape made by their overlap is

You can’t say it’s not imaginative. Voyage Intemporel is an early BD (1982) of Sergio Macedo’s that depicts a realm of celestial beings who take an interest in the spiritual evolution of life on Earth and become alarmed when humankind