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!

Birds, Tigers and Terrible Lizards

Our first big event of 2016, booked for 30th March, is Birds, Tigers & Terrible Lizards, a late London launch for two of our recent titles: J.T Welsch and Dom & Ink's Hell Creek Anthology and the many-poeted Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland. We'll also be having a little ten-month celebration of Lives Beyond Us, to round out the theme of the evening. There will be animal/dinosaur mask-making activities and a quiz, and readers on the night so far confirmed include:

J.T. Welsch
Christopher Reid
Alison Brackenbury
Sarah Hesketh
Richard Osmond
Peter Daniels
Jeremy Keighley
Dzifa Benson

The venue is LIBRARY in Covent Garden, which looks like this:

The Facebook page for the event is here, but if you don't use Facebook, please RSVP to us at events@sidekickbooks.com so that we know you're coming, as there will be a guest list system in operation and we don't want to leave anyone out in the cold.

The Sidekick Advent Calendar: Day 8

Today on the Sidekick Play-Poem Archive, we're releasing more birds! This time, it's the turn of Alison Brackenbury, with her resonant, fleeting tribute to the wintering fieldfare.

The Sidekick Advent Calendar: Day 6

A slight change of pace for Day 6, as we interview artist Lois Cordelia about her work on the Birdbook series and her stunning live demos.

Here's a taster!

Kirsten: Who are your major artistic influences?

Lois: My major artistic influence has been children's illustrator Jan Pienkowski (born 1936, in Warsaw), in whose West London studio I have worked part-time as an artist's assistant since the days of my GCSE art reference project (1999). Jan is best known for his Meg and Mog series, and for his pioneering pop-up books, including Haunted House, but he has also created many volumes of silhouette illustrations with a strong fairy-tale emphasis. His intricate silhouettes were originally hand-drawn, until I began cutting them out for him, based on his drawings, using a scalpel.

The most valuable thing I have absorbed from working so closely with Jan all these years is not the knowledge of art techniques, but rather his eccentric, sometimes completely 'crazy' approach towards art, and more generally towards life.

Most refreshing of all is his attitude towards so-called 'mistakes': Jan does not believe in mistakes. When something has just gone horribly 'wrong', he exclaims: "Wait! Maybe it's better like that!"

You can read the rest of the interview here on Lois's site.

Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland - Out Now

Our last release of 2015 is Birdbook: Farmland, Heathland, Mountain, Moorland, an anthology of newly commissioned poems and illustrations concerning an array of British birds, from corvids to game birds via hawks and owls.

We're also doing a special offer: you can buy both this release and its prequel, 2012's Birdbook: Freshwater Habitats, for £15 plus postage. That's over 100 new poems and illustrations by a heaving raft, or dazzling array, or splendid constellation of poets and illustrators. Even just listing the poets, there's Rachael Allen, Emily Berry, Liz Berry, David Morley, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Ira Lightman, W. N. Herbert, Gerry Cambridge, Claire Trevien, Chrissy Williams, John McCullough, Moniza Alvi, Sarah Hesketh, Peter Daniels, Vahni Capildeo, Lorraine Mariner, Christopher Reid, Antony Rowland, Hannah Lowe ... I could go on.

Animals, Amazons and ACE news!

Hallo one and all!

Hope your year is going mighty well. We've had our heads buried trying to make sense of what has already been a packed year of Stuff.

Brace yourself. We have a lot of exciting things to pack in here.

Firstly, those of a certain age might remember back, way back in the mists of time, talk of a lost edition of the fabled Fuselit magazine. Thought by many to be a myth, Amazon has now been unearthed! Featuring exquisite poetry, artwork and prose, this hand-sewn magazine comes with its own talismanic owl amulet and a set of six postcards detailing exchanges between the director Werner Herzog, fond of his Amazon-based films, and his best friend, the erratic, arrogant actor, Klaus Kinski.

Here is Werner Herzog drinking cough syrup out of his own slipper.

Fuselit: Amazon costs £10 and comes in its own card-and-plastic display case. Also, there is a gold monkey hiding inside for you to make friends with. She is called Rolo.

The best bit? This lovingly crafted relic is not available through Amazon! Muhaha!

OK, so onto the ACE news. That's both ACE, as in 90s-excellent and ACE, as in Arts Council England. For many years, Jon and I resisted applying for funding, preferring to fund Sidekick ourselves from our day job. That was all well and good until we realised that me going freelance and Jon going part-time, while splendid for productivity, chafed the funds somewhat. So we took a deep breath and a jot of advice from very kind indie publishers and applied to part-fund our next five books.

And, um, they said YES.

This is the moment a rep from ACE came to Sidekick HQ to tell us the news:

We're thrilled, mainly because it means we can pay contributors to these five books, many of whom have been collaborating with Sidekick for some time now. The five books we're producing with the funding are:

Lives Beyond Us, an anthology co-curated by film scholar Seb Manley and yours truly, featuring essays and poems on animals in cinema.

Birdbook III & IV. So exciting to know we can complete this beautiful series without compromising on production. The final two titles will feature the birds of the mountains, moorlands & heaths and saltwater species. III is so very near to completion I might just pop.

Surveyors' Riddles, our latest Team-Up, this time between poets Giles Goodland and Alistair Noon. In Alistair's own words, the pamphlet is "A sequence in classical enigmenga form, consisting of exactly 87 triquatrainal poems of varying types, the 39th poem being by a member of the Kim family, the 59th poem by a Russian symbolist, and the final poem being not allowed to reference the moon, the formal requirements followed faithfully and perfectly."

You hear that? NO MOON! The perfect collection for selenophobes everywhere. 

And on the Team-Up train, we're extremely excited about the forthcoming We Go Wandering at Night and Are Consumed by Fire, a collaboration between illustrator Hetti McArthur and poet Rowyda Amin. We're promised dark fairytales and plenty of getting lost in the woods of the imagination. More on that one later in the year.

Buuuut we got a little drunk on power. 

On top of our ACE books, we are also very excited to be publishing the following titles:

Laboratorio, edited by Simon Barraclough. Following on from his residency at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, and to complement his collection Sunspots, to be released through Penned in the Margins, Simon Barraclough presents an anthology of work written by scientists and poets on the trials and technology of space exploration, from satellites to silverfish. Contains dark matter.

Finders Keepers, a Team-Up exploring vanishing species, devised and created by artist Sophie "Moomintastic" Gainsley and poet Harry "Big in Macedonia" Man. You can see their work so far at this frankly BEAUTIFUL site.

Over the Line, a comics-poetry anthology co-edited by comics editor and comics-poetry aficionado Chrissy Williams and comics artist Tom Humberstone, for which WE WANT YOUR SUBMISSIONS! [Note to self: do not shorten 'comics poetry' to an acronym.]

And we have a whoooole bundle more plans lined up for 2016.

(Is that fox still jumping up and down? Righto.)

Thanks, as ever, for your love and support. We are always grateful for it, and keen to hear what you think. Can't wait to show you the new books!

A Sidekick Advent Calendar: Day 23

We kicked off the advent calendar with a Birdbook sample from the future. For our penultimate entry, then, a Birdbook sample from the past, and our very first volume. Tis the most Christmassy of birds, the fat old robin!

Poem by the ever-compelling Bethany Settle and artwork by the very talented Katherine Leedale.

Robin

The dark day I first
Grasped intuition
Robin
You were my reward
Lesson:
That which is needed
May be singing
To you
From several miles away
I learnt backwards,
Years later,
Now

Dipdipping
Chitchitchitting
You sung me
What is
Beneath skin, feathers
Atoms
So light - reboned, rescaled
I watched me from you
How hungry we both were

Now, years later,
We sing in all directions
We are the same,
Robin. Light,
Matter has dressed you in red,
But I can put it on
(And most days, do)

Birdbook Launch, 17 December!

It's on! Birdbook II: Freshwater Habitats will officially take flight at 7.30pm on Monday 17 December at Paper Dress Boutique and Bar, Shoreditch!

We'll be having short readings from a flock of the poets involved in the project, along with projections of the beautiful artwork representing each of these incredible freshwater birds. We're looking forward to meeting the talented writers and artists who have made this book such a treat to produce.

Nearest tubes are Shoreditch High St (Overground), Liverpool Street and Old Street, and stacks of buses go to the area.

Ah yes, and the Facebook event is here!

We'd love to say hello, so if you're in London at that time, come on down and have a flutter!

Birdbook 2: Freshwater Habitats

It's here, and it's packed. Featuring the work of:

Derek Adams, Anthony Adler, Rachael Allen, Carmen Ashworth, Andrew Bailey, Jo Bell, Emily Berry, Zoë Brigley, Sue Brown, Sam Buchan-Watts, Erika Bülow-Osborne, Mark Burnhope, Gerry Cambridge, Phil Cooper, Lois Cordelia, Sarah Coulston, Lorna Crabbe, M. P. Dean, Chris Emslie, Charlotte Geater, James Goodman, Luke Heeley, W. N. Herbert, Alexander Hutchison, Kirsten Irving, Andrew Buchanan Jackson, Valerie Josephs, Gregory Leadbetter, Alice Lee, Ann Leighton, Anna Le Moine Gray, Laurens Leysen, Ira Lightman, Rachel Lovatt, Sophie Mayer, John McCullough, Ian McLachlan, James Midgley, Harriet Moore, Siân Moore, Sarah Morrish, Sarah Ogilvie, Richard Osmond, Kate Parkinson, Abigail Parry, PopiRouge, Samuel Prince, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Erica Read, Julia Colquitt Roach, Christos Sakellaridis, Bethany Settle, Jon Stone, Katy-Rose Thorogood, Claire Trévien, Jen Wainwright, Alexis West, Chrissy Williams.

Birdbook II/Coin Opera II update!

So a brief update is very much in order on our next two books, Birdbook II: Freshwater habitats and Coin Opera II. To accompany this, I've tried to find an image that captures both projects.

Birdbook II is very nearly ready to go printerwards. We've received a foreword from the fantastic Tim Birkhead, proofing has been done and it's just minor tweaks to go. For the uninitiated, this is the second book in a series of four, in which we aim to gather one poem and one illustration for every species of British bird. Each book covers a group of habitats. Volume II is looking great, helped in no small part by the return of Lois Cordelia, who has once again provided her beautiful artwork for the cover.

Coin Opera II, our second anthology of poetic tributes to computer games, is looking good too. With cover art by the very talented Mike Stone and a whole bundle of computer game-themed formal Easter eggs (including what may be the world's first set of 'boss' poems), this is going to be a mighty power-up from our initial micro-anthology, back in 2009. A foreword from Uncanny X Men writer and video games journalist Kieron Gillen, a spot more collaging and rearranging, a good old proof and it'll be off to press before you can say Hadouken.

More updates to come. Stay tuned!

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