Author Archives: AYUpublishing

Elbow Room Live (And a Sale)

Posted
Filed under Lit mag

Well, this is exciting… After what seems like an age we are returning to The Harrison for Elbow Room Live THIS coming Friday. Our line up celebrates both Volumes 13 and 14, with readings from Richard Skinner, Gram Joel Davis, Owen Vince and Harry Denniston.

We are also thrilled to have the chance to invite Jeremy Tuplin to the Elbow Room stage with his soulful music and intriguing lyrics.

 

We cannot wait for a night of incredible poetry, prose and live music and truly hope to see you all there. If you can’t make it (and even if you can) we are also having our first ever sale, with everything currently half price. Take a look around our website shop (http://www.elbow-room.org/shop/) and hopefully see you Friday!

The Elbow Room Prize 2016

Posted
Filed under Competitions

The Elbow Room Prize has returned for a second year to celebrate art in all guises. The deadline is Sunday the 14th of August at midnight GMT.

We at Elbow Room a delighted to return with The Elbow Room Prize for a second year. With the deadline fast approaching we want to make sure everyone has had their chance to enter. We love short fiction of every kind at Elbow Room and can think of nothing more enjoyable than poring over well crafted fiction from every genre, style and subject out there.

The prize will culminate in a London based exhibition, reading and anthology publication. We once again look forward to receiving and sharing your gems with the world.

For more details about the event take a look at The Elbow Room Prize 2015.

The Elbow Room Prize 2015 anthology is available for sale in our shop, www.elbow-room.org/shop

Winners will be notified by Wednesday the 30th of September via email and will be publicised on the website soon after.

The event will be held towards the end of October and will be publicised after the winners are announced.

The Judging Panel:

Zelda Chappel grew up in London and the South of England. She is co-curator at Elbow Room. She writes, often on the back of things and never in black ink. Her work has been published in a number of publications both online and in print. in 2014, Zelda won the Battered Moons Poetry Competition. Her debut collection, Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat was published by Bare Fiction in 2015.

Harry Denniston is a short story writer, poet and playwright currently based in London. His work has been published in places such as Elbow Room, Inky Needles, Dactyl and Quick Fictions, and his plays have been performed in London, Norwich and Edinburgh. Harry was one of the inaugural Elbow Room Prize winners.

Rosie Sherwood is an artist, scholar and independent publisher. As the heart of Sherwood’s interdisciplinary practise is a fascination with time and a desire to tell stories. In 2012 Sherwood founded As Yet Untitled and started publishing Elbow Room. Sherwood graduated from Camberwell College of Arts with an MA in Book Arts in 2013. She has delivered conference papers and University lectures across the country. Sherwood has taken part in artist book fairs, as well as group and solo exhibition, most recently at the Southbank Centre. Sherwood’s work can be found in special collections including The Poetry Library, Tate Library and Archive and the national libraries of both Victoria and Queensland (Australia).

Categories

For full details on each category and how to enter please visit our website www.elbow-room.org

Poetry

(For full details on submitting your poetry to The Elbow Room Prize click HERE or on POETRY box)

Prose

(For full details on submitting your short fiction to The Elbow Room Prize click HERE or on SHORT FICTION box)

Visual Arts

(For full details on submitting your visual arts to The Elbow Room Prize click HERE or on VISUAL ARTS box)

Prizes

For each category:

First prize in each category: £200

Second and third prizes in each category: £50 each

All winners will be published in a special competition anthology edition of Elbow Room.

All winners will be featured in a London based exhibition and live event.

 

FAQ (for all categories)

You do not have to be a London (or even UK) based artist/writer to enter. If your work is selected and you are unable to attend or transport your work to the event, solutions will be found to ensure you are featured.

All entries will be judged anonymously so it is important that your name does not appear anywhere on the work itself.

Visual Arts include (but are not limited to) Painting, Printmaking, Photography, Drawing, Illustration, Sculpture, Video Arts, Animation, Books Arts and mixed media pieces. If you are unsure if your work qualifies please do not hesitate to contact us.

For the visual arts category we are classifying a piece of work as a single image, video, sculpture or object. This can include a book (or similar) that includes multiple images within it so long at they are contained/bound together. If you are unsure if your work qualifies do not hesitate to contact us for further details.

The visual arts submissions will be being judged as the based on the quality of the original piece of work rather than how it will appear in publication format. If multiple images of the same piece of work are needed to best display it for the judges (eg an installation or sculptor) that is completely acceptable.

We will happily accept work by artists and writers working collaboratively, please simply include all your names and biographical details in the body of your email. Please do not hesitate to contact us for further details if required.

The piece submitted can be from a larger body of work or series. If this is the case please indicate in the description of the work.

Any video art or animation entrees must be no longer than 20 minutes.

If your work is untitled that is fine but please clearly state this.

Any further questions can be sent to elbowroomsubmissions@gmail.com with the subject line Elbow Room Competition Question.

Elbow Room reserves the right to change the judging panel or not to award prizes.

We reserve the right to use your work to promote the event but all copyright remains with the writers/artists.

Elbow Room and As Yet Untitled- A Crowd Funding Campaign.

Posted
Filed under Lit mag

The Elbow Room Prize is officially completed for 2015. The winners are announced, the anthology is on sale and our event was a resounding success. We can’t wait to do it all again next year. Bu that is next year and this is now. And we have a plan we need your help with.

As some of you may know Elbow Room is published by As Yet Untitled. Specialising in limited edition, handmade books Elbow Room has long been at the very centre of the press. Since launching all those years ago Elbow Room has grown and amazed us is so many ways. The support and community we have built is incredible but it is time to do more: more with Elbow Room and more with As Yet Untitled itself.

After much conversation and planning we are taking the next steps in our journey.

From next year onwards As Yet Untitled will be collaborating with some incredible artists and writers to create new artists’ books.

Books but not as you know.

Unusual, exciting and fantastical books.

Books that tell stories and explore narrative.

To do this we need your help.

We have started a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter to raise the funds we need to buy equipment and material for this next stage. Crowd funding is something we feel passionately about. It is the chance for the public to act as patrons to the arts. It is only with your support that we will be able to start work on creating and releasing these new books. Nor are we going to forget about Elbow Room. Everything we buy for the press will help make Elbow Room an even more beautifully crafted pamphlet, increase our print runs, allow us to have a wider distribution and greater promotion. Even the smallest pledge makes the biggest difference.

We have carefully selected every reward we are offering to reflect the project and hope there is something there for everyone. All the details (including a video in which you get to watch The Elbow Room Prize anthology being made) are HERE on our project page.

If you enjoy the arts, books, and storytelling we need your support. Your pledge to our Kickstarter not only helps us but all the artists’ and writers we work with. Help us pay it forward.

Take a look, pledge and share the details far and wide.

Thank you for helping to make our dreams a reality.

The Elbow Room Prize 2015- Event and Anthology

Posted
Filed under Lit mag

Cover

Elbow Room promised a number of things to the winners of our inaugural competition. Prize money, a London based event and a publication. All of these are important, tempting and impactful in different ways. The prize money is simple, ready and waiting once we have our winners selected. The event planning is well underway, the venue booked, the details being worked out, the flyers and information out and being shared. We hope it will be a wonderful evening and a successful weekend. The prize night will be October 16th from 6.oopm and we would love to see you all there. It’s free, will be a night to remember and we promise cake as well as art, short stories, poetry and live music.

Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/688853477882644/

Of everything we’ve promise people it is the publication that is the longest lasting, the most impactful. After the prize money is spent and the event a fond memories the publication will remain. Despite not yet knowing exactly what will be between the covers we’ve had long discussions about how we want to make it. The beauty of the object is important to us, the way it looks and the way it feels. We want our first Elbow Room Prize anthology to retain the values that make our quarterly magazine special, to be hand bound, the use the same luxurious paper, to look and feel like an object of value. We want this for two reasons…

Firstly because that’s what As Yet Untitled publishing is all about.

Secondly (and most importantly) because the work that is eventually selected, printed and bound together is valuable and deserves only the best.

We have made our design choices, settled on a binding technique, prepared the cover. The book is going to have a limited first edition, numbered and collectable. We thought, while we finalise our winners, print and bind, that we would put the book up available for pre-order for anyone who is already absolutely certain that they want a copy. It will be release on October 16th and any pre-ordered copies will go in the post that very day. You can order it here: www.elbow-room.org/shop

Now back to the (impossible, enjoyable, enchanting, enthralling, complicated) judging,

Rosie, Zelda and Lauren.

Elbow Room Competition – Deadline Extended!

Posted
Filed under Lit mag

We would like to start this blog by saying thank you to everyone who has helped spread the word or entered the Elbow Room Competition. Due to the amazing amount of activity you have all generated a lot of people have only just found the competition and expressed sadness that they don’t have time to prepare their entry. We know exactly how annoying it is to find something you really want to take part in only days (or even hours) before the deadline. This got us thinking. In life there are deadlines we cannot change or control. This is not one of those. This competition is as much (if not more) about you as it is about us. We want everyone who wants to enter to have the chance to. It is with this in mind that we are extending the deadline until midnight Friday 21st August. We know it’s not long but we hope it is long enough. It should give everyone a chance to get his or her creations to us while still leaving us ample time to give your work the consideration it deserves.

See our website for more details on how to enter www.elbow-room.org/competition

We will be at our emails and computer ready to answer any and all questions until then.

Best Wishes and Good Luck

Rosie, Zelda and Lauren.

Elbow Room Competition- Less than two weeks to go!

Posted
Filed under Lit mag

With a little under two weeks left until the deadline of our inaugural competition we thought we would share a few details about Elbow Room, the competition and what we do here on the Short Stops blog.

Elbow Room was inspired by a desire to muddle up the worlds neatly categorised bookshelves. To stop putting poetry over here and photography over there, fiction over here and sculpture far, far over there, music on this shelf and painting on that one and instead sit them cover-to-cover, showing and sharing inspirations, similarities and yes, differences. We wanted to create a space that celebrates art in all guises and so we made Elbow Room.

Elbow Room started life a publication. The print run for Volume One was so small we only had 15 copies. Volume Nine (our latest) is a print run of 50 copies and includes photography, mixed media embroidery, poetry and a short story. Each volume is carefully curated and thoughtfully produced, hand bound and numbered. We want to create a publication that people want to keep and collect, one that reflects and compliments the work between its covers. Every time someone takes a copy of Elbow Room home or a new bookshop agrees to stock us is a thrill. That we are on the shelves in shops as diverse as the bookartbookshop and Foyles is more than we dared hoped for when we started this journey and reflects the breadth of the work we publish.
With the Competition Anthology edition we want to show off the talent and diversity of the poets, writers and artists working today. We want to create a book of the same high quality as Elbow Room but that also a little different. A book that lives up to the submissions we are receiving and that can be read and enjoyed with ease. From the choice of paper to the printing, the cover design to the binding we intend to make every element of the publication the highest quality possible. We have already started making plans, discussing ideas, hoping and dreaming about the book we can put out to celebrate the competition and to promote the community of artists’ who make Elbow Room possible. Now all we need are your submissions.

Help us make this anthology the best it can be, share the competition among your friends and colleagues, submit your short stories to us and then let us publish and promote the book around the UK and across the world.
However Elbow Room and the competition doesn’t end with the publications. Elbow Room Live has become an integral part of what we do. Bringing art off the page and together in one space Elbow Room Live has brought poetry and music to London and Norwich.

It is with these live events in mind that we are planning a mini autumn festival of the arts for the competition. In October the winners and runners up in all three categories will be showcased in London. Somewhere (we haven’t chosen a venue yet) we will host an exhibition and a night of live readings. Short stories, poems and visual art will share a space and an audience for a weekend. Whether you live in or near London does not matter, submit your work from anywhere in world and if you are placed in the competition we will work out how to include your work in the festival.

It is truly important to us that the competition showcases as diverse a cross section of the arts as possible. That we show off the incredible work of incredible artists from across multiple disciplines. In the next few weeks it is your job to decide if you want to enter and share your work with us. It is our job to ensure that our first competition is a true celebration of art in all guises.

Let us know if you have any questions and keep the submissions coming in.
All the details on how to enter are on the website www.elbow-room.org/competition
Best Wishes and Good Luck,
Rosie, Zelda and Lauren

Elbow Room Competition

Posted
Filed under Lit mag

We at Elbow Room have decided to celebrate the diversity and talent we have encountered over three delightful and successful years. We are inviting artists and writers from across the arts to submit work to our inaugural competition, which will culminate in a special event and publication. The competition launched on the 1st of June and, closing on the 16th of August, currently has one month left. We are delighted by the responses so far.

Watching our daily page hits climb and climb and our first entries start to come in feels like the beginning of something very special. Since launching we have had over 2000 page hits from more than a 1000 visitors to the website. Thats quadruple the number of people visiting the site than the month before. But we want still more people to know and so are trying to get the word out about the competition out as far and wide as possible. If anyone has any suggestions or wants to tweet, share it on Facebook, put up posters, blog about it, send out carrier pigeons or write in the sky you are more than welcome to.

Elbow Room was inspired by a desire to muddle up the worlds neatly categorised bookshelves. To stop putting poetry over here and photography over there, fiction over here and sculpture far, far over there, music on this shelf and painting on that one and instead sit them cover-to-cover, showing and sharing inspirations, similarities and yes, differences. We wanted to create a space that celebrates art in all guises and so we made Elbow Room.

This competition is part of that celebration. In October the winners and runners up in all three categories will be part of an event in London, a mini autumn festival of the arts. Somewhere (we haven’t chosen a venue yet) we will host an exhibition and a night of live readings. Short stories, poems and visual art will share a space and an audience for a weekend. In the pages of the competition anthology they will share a space for a lot longer than that.

It is truly important to us that the competition showcases as diverse a cross section of the arts as possible. That we show off the incredible work of incredible artists from across multiple disciplines. In the next month it is your job to decide if you want to enter and share your work with us. It is our job to ensure that our first competition is a true celebration of art in all guises.

We are ready and waiting for all your amazing work. We can’t wait to see what we get.

Here are a few details but for full guidelines and to enter please visit our website www.elbow-room.org/competition

Deadline: Sunday the 16th of August at midnight GMT.

Winners will be notified by Wednesday the 30th of September via email and will be publicised on the website soon after.

The event will be held towards the end of October and will be publicised after the winners are announced.

The Judging Panel includes Rosie Sherwood, Zelda Chappel and Lauren Fried.

Categories

Poetry

Prose

Visual Arts

 

Prizes for each category

First prize in each category: £200

Second and third prizes in each category: £50 each

All winners will be published in a special competition anthology edition of Elbow Room.

All winners will be featured in a London based exhibition and live event.