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Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably the Bloodaxe Staying Alive trilogy: Staying Alive (Bloodaxe, UK 2002/ Miramax, US 2003), Being Alive (2004) and Being Human (2011), along with Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012). His other anthologies (all these from Bloodaxe) include Earth Shattering: ecopoems (2007), The Hundred Years' War: modern war poems (2014), and three collaborations with with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds (2008), and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets (2008) and In Person: World Poets (2017). He has published two novels, The End of My Tether (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Sheep Who Changed the World (2005). In 2012 Candlestick Press published his selection of Ten Poems About Sheep in its renowned pamphlet series. In 2015 he guest-edited a special international issue of the American literary journal Ploughshares, its first all-poetry issue in its 44-year history. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry from the Society of Authors in 1982 and was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995. He is a trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival, and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.Anna Selby was born in Shropshire in 1982 to a Canadian artist and a British minimalist. She was one of four writers selected from the UK to travel to Bangladesh with the British Council as part of a writing exchange project with young Bangladeshi writers. In 2011, she was shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award. Her poetry has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including Smiths Knoll, Magma, The Rialto and the Cinnamon Anthology of Young British Poets. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters at the University of East Anglia. A specialist in contemporary international poetry, she works as Literature and Spoken Word Co-ordinator at the Southbank Centre and is an associate artist of dance-film company, State of Flux. She is co-editor with Neil Astley of The World Record: international voices from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus (Bloodaxe Books/Southbank Centre, 2012). Her pamphlet, The Burning, was published by Salt in 2013.
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