Magma Poetry

Come and join us for the launch reading of the new issue of Magma on Monday 5th March at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London, as part of the Coffee House Series.

The event will be full of contributors who’ll be coming to read, and we’re also thrilled to have as our guest readers Greta Stoddart and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch who have both contributed poems to this issue.

The evening will start at 8pm sharp, at The Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 (near Earl’s Court Tube). Tickets are £7/£6 concessions; doors open at 7.30pm. Come early for the best seats, to get yourself a drink, buy a copy of the magazine or chat to a member of the Magma team.

This issue, edited by Roberta James with Helen Nicholson, is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops.

Hope you can make it. We’d love to see you there.

We would be delighted if you would join us for this event at Waterloo East Theatre, Brad Street, London SE1 8TN (5 minutes walk from Waterloo Station)

Doors (and bar) open 6.30.

What an evening it was. A cold night, a packed house, and the utterly complementary talents of Pascale Petit and Selima Hill as our guest readers.

We were also fortunate to host a large number of contributors, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels and even California.

Magma 51 is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops. The issue is edited by Jacqueline Saphra with Ian McEwen with the theme ‘Profane and Sacred’.

Don’t miss the Magma 51 launch reading on Monday 14th November at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

Magma’s launch readings have been hosted by Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for many years.

Knowing many Magma readers are also Coffee-House regulars, we would like to bring to your attention the Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

It’s been a busy summer for Magma Poetry; we’ve taken part in three fantastic festivals all in the space of a month.

Clare Pollard and I took the train up to Bridlington in June, and spent a couple of days at the fabulously located Bridlington Festival, in the setting of the gorgeous Sewerby Hall. The hall itself is grand enough, but the grounds are even grander and overlook the sea. Clare took an editing workshop which sounded brilliant. I say sounded brilliant, because as I went up there to see how things were going, I could hear the laughter coming all the way down the stairs. But of course serious things were said and done, and it was clear from the faces of the participants that they were enthused about poetry and the editing process. Later, I took part in a panel discussion with Peter Sansom, longtime editor of The North, and Clare did a wonderful reading from her new book, Changeling.

Magma celebrated its 50th issue on Monday 27 June with a full-house Troubadour. A huge and yummy cake was brought in, and everyone collected their Magma 50 souvenir badges. This issue is edited by Clare Pollard, with the newly redesigned Magma magazine featuring  fabulous hand-drawn illustrations by poet-and-designer Henry Simmonds.

Magma 50 is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops. The issue edited by Clare Pollard with the theme ‘Journeys’.

Don’t miss the Magma 50 launch reading on Monday 27 June at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

Magma Poetry is going to be hosting its first Online Meet-the-Editors Q&A session via Twitter on Friday 3 June at 1.00 p.m. British Summer Time (12 noon GMT) for about an hour. And we welcome questions and queries – on Twitter please! – from now until Friday.

Julia Bird, editor of the current issue, Magma 49, will answer your questions and queries about editing the magazine. You will need a Twitter account to ask a question, but you can read the dialogue even if you don’t. So if you’ve ever wondered whether poems have to be on theme, how the rotating editorship affects decisions, whether you can submit a poem if you’ve never been published before, or how long a poem should be, or any other query related to publishing poems in Magma, on Friday 3 June, Julia will have the answers.

If you weren’t able to attend the launch of Magma 49, you can still listen to poems read on the night by some of the contributors to Magma 49.

These recordings are introduced by Julia Bird, the Magma 49 editor. (If you’re reading this via email you may need to click through to the main site to listen to the recordings.)