England: poems from a school

Oxford Spires Academy is a small comprehensive school with 30 languages – and one special focus: poetry. In the last five years, its students have won every prize going. They have been celebrated in the Guardian ('The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group’), and the subject of a BBC Radio 3 documentary. In this unique anthology, their mentor and teacher prize-winning poet Kate Clanchy brings their poems together, and allowing readers to see why their work has caused such a stir. By turns raw and direct, funny and powerful, lyrical and heartbreaking, they document the pain of migration and the exhilaration of building a new land, an England of a thousand voices. In England: Poems from a School, you will find poetry is easy to read and hard to forget, as fresh, bright and present as the young migrants who produced it

The not-dead and the saved and other stories

None of us are perfect, in the way we love, age, or view the world. The Not-Dead and the Saved offers us an opportunity for reinvention: of ourselves, those we have lost, and the world in which we live. From a man doomed to spend his life trying to find solutions to cancer; to a new mother haunted by a swaddling, tablet-eating great-aunt; to an intrepid literary agent who travels to the Yorkshire Moors to discover the next big thing, and ends up eating Anne Bronte's rock cakes, we meet a host of characters who are desperately, creatively, and often hilariously trying to evade the underlying truths of their lives. The Not-Dead and the Saved is a cascade, of warm, wise and insightful stories about human nature, frank, funny, and sometimes desolating, but always underpinned by tenderness, and by a faith in enduring bonds of love

Some kids I taught and what they taught me

Kate Clanchy has taught in state schools for nearly thirty years. Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me is a book about a life’s work spent teaching in a national institution. By telling the stories of some of the kids she’s taught, some of the teachers she’s worked with, and some of the lessons she’s learned, Clanchy offers a revelatory picture of school life, and a fascinating look at the role education plays in our society today. This is not a work of moaning pessimism or dry sociology, lamenting the actions of successive governments when it comes to policy decisions. While Some Kids acknowledges the undoubtedly difficult situation in many schools, Clanchy writes beautifully about her students as people, whose diversity, humour and sheer brains she aims to celebrate; she writes about the uplifting power of teaching when practised well, about the success she’s seen and encouraged in some of the most challenged and challenging pupils she knows, and about the effect all of this had on her, as a teacher, mother and citizen. As well as her real-world experience in schools, Clanchy is a prize-winning author of fiction and poetry. This unique combination of talents – her decades in the classroom, her fearlessness and wit, her poet’s eye and inimitable voice – allow her to explore serious questions by telling human stories that are sometimes funny sometimes sad, but always moving and deeply sympathetic. Some Kids I Taught And What They Taught Me is a relevant, affecting and agenda-setting book that will really get people talking

6. Prismatic Translation

Here are the key principles of ‘Prismatic Translation’, one of Creative Multilingualism’s research strands: Translation generates multiple new texts: it is inherently creative. Translation works differently with different kinds of languages: for instance, in the ‘Chinese scriptworld’, speech and writing do not interact in the same way as with European languages, so translation has other processes and results. Translation can merge with other modes of writing and re-writing: poetry and fiction..

Readers: Books and Biography

This chapter investigates how book historians have used autobiographical records and documents – diaries, notebooks and commonplace books, and marginalia – to uncover the place of books and reading in everyday life from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century. It aims to provide a survey of the field while also drawing on individual case studies of particular readers. It demonstrates how readers used their books and shows how the individual act of reading was embedded within a larger web of social, economic, and educational contexts. Attending to autobiographical documents can provide information about how reading practices were shaped and influenced by the book trade, social and correspondence networks, and institutions of reading such as subscription libraries. The material forms of autobiography, meanwhile, show how reading in the past has been shaped by social practices, such as commonplacing, letter writing, and marginal annotation

Viktor Krivulin. Concerto a richiesta e altre poesie, a cura di Marco Sabbatini

Prima raccolta antologica in italiano di Viktor Krivulin, con saggio introduttivo, nota bio-bibliografica, note ai testi e traduzioni a cura di Marco Sabbatin

Creative Multilingualism

Multilingualism is integral to the human condition. Hinging on the concept of Creative Multilingualism – the idea that language diversity and creativity are mutually enriching – this timely and thought provoking volume shows how the concept provides a matrix for experimentation with ideas, approaches and methods. The book presents four years of joint research on multilingualism across disciplines, from the humanities through to the social and natural sciences. It is structured as a manifesto, comprising ten major statements which are unpacked through various case studies across ten chapters. They encompass areas including the rich relationship between language diversity and diversity of identity, thought and expression; the interaction between language diversity and biodiversity; the ‘prismatic’ unfolding of meaning in translation; the benefits of linguistic creativity in a classroom-seting; and the ingenuity underpinning ‘conlangs’ (‘constructed languages’) designed to give imagined peoples a distinctive medium capable of expressing their cultural identity. This book is a welcome contribution to the field of modern languages, highlighting the intricate relationship between multilingualism and creativity, and, crucially, reaching beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. Intended to spark further research and discussion, this book appeals to young people interested in languages, language learning and cultural exchange. It will be a valuable resource for academics, educators, policy makers and parents of bilingual or multilingual children. Its accessible style also speaks to general readers interested in the role of language diversity in our everyday lives, and the untapped creative potential of multilingualism. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.co