As energising and confrontational as the music it examined, Shell Shock Rock (1978), John T Davis’ first major film looked at the burgeoning northern punk music scene and introduced us to a documentary filmmaker unafraid to challenge the conventions of the genre. Born in Belfast in 1947, Davis’s first experience of filmmaking came via...
Mark Granier was born in London in 1957 and brought up in Dublin, where he still lives. He has published two collections of poetry with Salmon Poetry, AIRBORNE (2001) and THE SKY ROAD (2007). Mark Granier is also a photographer and has done cover work for a number of publications, including his own books....
Celebrated poet, author, artist, essayist, and activist Breyten Breytenbach was born in 1939 in the Western Cape and studied Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, before leaving the country in 1959. His literary debut Catastrophes (1964), a volume of stories, was followed by The Iron Cow Must Sweat . The latter was...
My first memory is of standing in a hospital cot at night, looking over the cot bars to a rocking horse on the other side of the ward. There were coloured rings over the ward door. Utter silence, though there must have been the hum of traffic from the Holloway Road in London. The...
Did I ever tell you about the time, when I was two going on three, I fell out of my crib, in this case a plywood tea chest, and banged my head against the concrete floor? Everyone agreed there was no harm done, but if you have doubts about me or my writing I...
I grew up on the edge of a wetland meadow or Callows. The Callows was a wonderful place to get away to, a kind of outback where I felt I could hear myself think. I could reflect on my surroundings, try to understand the mystery and the magic. Poems only came later, in my...