Ira Lightman plays with words, the look of them, the sound of them, the dictionary meaning of them, the way that the English language works in comparison with other languages. He also loves to perform, to jump around, whoop, sing and pull faces while adopting strange voices. He has published 3 books, Duetcetera, Mustard Tart as Lemon, and I, Love Poetry, and 25 years’ worth of pamphlets and visual poems. He likes finding patterns in language and life, and mathematics was his best subject at school. He often makes community art, interviewing local communities for sayings about their town and then shaping the language into visual art. In 2013, he became the “plagiarism sleuth”, highlighting and exposing poetry plagiarists in sometimes prominent positions. He is interested in ideas, and people. Robert Peake: “Resisting the temptation of so many experimentalists to keep the reader at a safe intellectual distance, he instead plunges us straight in to the intimate inner workings of his psyche. And what a world it is.
“As surreal as Vic ‘n Bob”, Kate Fox, BBC2 Daily Politics show.
“Ira Lightman pushes the boundaries of word-play, but retains something of the human in doing so. ” – Robert Peake, Huffington Post.
(Photograph of Ira Lightman copyright Matthew Andrews)
Sarah Passingham has published four books of non-fiction and a libretto. She is the short fiction columnist for the magazine Brittle Star and her stories have appeared in journals including The London Magazine, Stand, in the anthology Said and Done, and been broadcast by the BBC. In 1996 she won the Julia Fitzgerald Award for Short Fiction. Her family memoir is nearing completion.
“With a subtle prose that is at once forensically precise and deceptively simple, Sarah Passingham is able to show how the wonderful or the macabre can dwell in scenes of quotidian ordinariness. And, like all great short-story writers, she is able to imply entire lives or the plots of whole novels in a matter of a few pages. Superb.” Mark Cocker