Books
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My new collection is called Afternoons Go Nowhere. You can find a couple of poems from it on the Poems page and there's a review on the gwales site here.
My last collection was Short Days, Long Shadows (Seren 2014). It's a sort of goodbye to Cardiff, where I lived for many years, and a hello to Shetland, where I live now, with brief excursions to Norway, Germany and various historical periods. It was launched in Cardiff in June 2014 and I read from it at the Shetland WordPlay festival at Mareel in November.
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A poem from the collection was also the Guardian Saturday Poem on 12 July and you can read it here.
"This consummate collection has the certainty of touch one has come to expect from Sheenagh Pugh" - Cathy Bryant, Write Out Loud
"There is an honesty in Short Days, Long Shadows and the use of the language of everyman that can't help but make the reader feel included in the journey. In the end you need to let Sheenagh Pugh's deceptively simple poems do the talking, and they talk in a delightful way." - James Sinclair,The New Shetlander.
" revels in the ice hotel that will melt in spring and be rebuilt differently, catches and holds up the moment when your eyes see something not quite there, and relishes the truth that even the most seemingly permanent natural structures are 'on the move.'" - Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
"Short Days, Long Shadows is a highly readable collection with perhaps half a dozen of the best poems Pugh has written and these wear their profundity so lightly that you will want to go back and re-read them to find out with what cunning, near-invisible skill they have been composed."
- Martyn Crucefix, in this review
Long-Haul Travellers came out in October 2008 from Seren. It does contain poems about "real" sea journeys, notably up the coast of Norway, but also about more nebulous and figurative voyages like, for example, the journeys of those equivocal adventurers Murat Reis and Tristan Jones from one identity to another, and that of Adwaitya the tortoise through several lifetimes of men . Not to mention the longest journey of all, that which the ghost of "Josephine" makes from death back to life in the mind of her bereaved father.
Long-Haul Travellers was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize and long-listed for the Wales Book of the Year Prize.
In 2009 Seren published my Later Selected Poems, which contains work from five post-1990 collections, Sing for the Taxman, Id's Hospit, Stonelight, The Beautiful Lie and The Movement of Bodies.
"Almost any poetry reader - indeed, any reader - would be pushed not to find something to enjoy in Sheenagh Pugh's Later Selected poems.[...] a voice worth listening to."
Ben Wlkinson, Poetry Review
"Pugh's poems are often ticking shells, primed by politics and passion [...] intense as opera, irreconcilable truths confront the reader. What is this but poetry? Its story has not ended. I look forward hungrily to the next chapter."
Alison Brackenbury, Poetry Wales
There's a list of my older collections and prose books on the About Me page. My two novels are Kirstie's Witnesses (Shetland Times Ltd 1998) and Folk Music (Seren 1999).
I've also written a study of fan fiction: The Democratic Genre: fan fiction in a literary context (Seren). Some quotes from reviews:
The most authoritative book on the subject
The Sunday Telegraph
A lively book which lovingly details fan writers' private language.
The Independent
Sheenagh Pugh has found an entire coterie out there busy revivifying Jane Austen's characters, giving the second and third daughters their own pasts and futures and listening, as Austen never had the chance to do, to what the heroes say to each other in their London clubs.
The Guardian
Perhaps the most satisfactory work I've read so far on fanfic, if only because it's not looking for the Single Unitary Theory of why people write fanfic, and not assuming that there is something Really Strange about people who do. It's a good read in itself and has a lot of interesting and thought-provoking things to say.
Lesley Hall
