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Vote for Sidekick Books in this year’s Saboteur Awards!


The Saboteur Awards are now open for nominations! Since the vast majority of poetry prizes in the UK focus almost exclusively on single-author collections, the Saboteur Awards are Sidekick’s only real chance to win garlands for our amazing poets, artists and contributors. The shortlist and subsequent winners are decided by popular vote, and it’s therefore very important that readers and fans of our books take part in the voting process if we’re to stand a chance. With that in mind, we humbly request your support!

The nominations round is open until 24th April, and involves filling out at least three categories on the form on this page.

Here are the categories we are eligible for:

1. Nominate the Most Innovative Publisher


We’d really like you to put us down for this! No other publisher that we’re aware of is mixing together different media and experimenting so freely with the possible forms of the poetry anthology and pamphlet.

6. Nominate a Best Collaborative Work


We have two eligible titles for this category: Hell Creek Anthology by J.T. Welsch and Dom & Ink, which is an illustrated retelling of the Spoon River Anthology with dinosaurs from Montana. And Surveyors’ Riddles by Alistair Noon and Giles Goodland, in which the two poets trade poems reactively and spontaneously, generating a sprawling mixture of alt-history, satire and prophetic puzzles.

12. Nominate a Best Anthology


We have two titles eligible for this category: Over The Line: An Introduction to Poetry Comics, edited by Chrissy Williams and Tom Humberstone, which is the UK’s first anthology of poetry comics and which comes endorsed by both Alan Moore and Poetry London. And Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland, which is our third mega-collection of contemporary bird poems and illustrations, with poems by, among others, David Morley, who has just won the Ted Hughes Award, and Chris Beckett, who was nominated for the same award.

Feel free to fill out the other categories in whatever fashion suits you. Thanks in advance for your support and your time, everyone!

The Sidekick Advent Calendar: Day 3

Day 3! Time to get out your exploring hat and go digging through the cultural sediments with Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon. Yes, today’s Sidekick Play Poem comes from the Team-Up Surveyors Riddles, and takes a dance with Dante.

On your way with you, and don’t forget to snag thread on wall before you venture in.


Sidekick at the Albion Beatnik


A selection of our 2015/14 titles are now stocked at the legendary Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford. If you live in Oxford and wish to browse before you buy, visit the Albion! If you live in Oxford and wish to avoid this website’s postage costs, visit the Albion!

Also, in the next few days, we’ll be publishing a short video of our recent Surveyors’ Riddles launch reading held there. Here’s an arty photo from the evening in question.

Surveyors’ Riddles Oxford Launch


Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon will be launching their sprawlingly epic collaborative pamphlet Surveyors’ Riddles at the Albion Beatnik in Oxford this Friday, 2nd October, from 7.30pm.

That’s the Albion Beatnik, 34 Walton Street in Oxford, the very next Friday after this very blogpost, from half past seven o’clock in the evening!

But what is Surveyors’ Riddles exactly? Or rather, what are the Surveyors’ Riddles? A lost ancient text from an alternative dimension? A kind of auto-mutating procedural text containing clues to the past and the future? A series of translations that take place through a dozen languages?  Do even Noon and Goodland know what they have uncovered through their audacious technique of ‘genetic poem sequencing’?

We at Sidekick invite you to let this ever-shifting, anarcho-comic-historic poemavalanche swallow you up.

Surveyors’ Riddles Oxford launch in October!




We’re very excited to give you a date for your October diaries, with the launch of our latest Team-Up, Surveyors’ Riddles! On Fri 2 October at 7.30 pm, get thee to the Albion Beatnik, 34 Walton St, Oxford for a night of poetic chicanery and outright lies.

The result of some serious formal (and informal) mischief by poets Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon, Surveyors’ Riddles is a sequence written in the classic ‘enigmenga’ form and translated out of the original tongue. 

At least, it might be. Frankly, the more you read of this devious title, the more you come to doubt a words its authors are saying. Expect layered, gneissic verses glittering with allusions to the contemporary, the historical and the alt-historical, and spot the tricks where you can.

For other Sidekick Books Team-Ups, head here!

CONTACT:

contact [a] sidekickbooks.com

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