Issue 14 (2023)

Articles are published on a rolling basis throughout the year. Follow our X feed @pvcrs to be notified when new interviews and essays are added to the journal website.

Natalie Sirett, Natalie Shaw and Joanne Reardon

Natalie Sirett is a multimedia artist. She has exhibited extensively at home and abroad, most recently at the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She illustrated Sita Brahmachari’s When Shadows Fall (2022), which was Times and Guardian Book of the Year and nominated for the Carnegie Medal. She is a Stirling Maxwell Fellow for Text & Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow.

Natalie Shaw is a poet who has been described as ‘wonderfully bananas’ by the Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent collection, Dirty Martini, was published in 2023 by Broken Sleep Books. Her first collection Oh Be Quiet was published by Against the Grain Press. She has been commended in the National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.

Joanne Reardon is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University. She works extensively with visual artists on site-specific projects in museums and art galleries including Warrington Art Gallery and the Corinium Museum, Cirencester. Her novel, The Weight of Bones, was shortlisted for the 2017 Cinnamon Debut Novel Award and published by Cinnamon Press in 2020.

In this conversation for Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, Joanne Reardon talks to Natalie Sirett and Natalie Shaw about their book project Medusa and Her Sisters – a collaborative, illustrated work featuring sonnets by fourteen poets. Natalie Shaw and Joanne Reardon both contributed poems to the collection; all were written in response to Natalie Sirett’s artwork. The book was launched together with an exhibition at Burgh House Museum in Hampstead in October 2019. The conversation was recorded online in April 2023.

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Roz Kaveney

Roz Kaveney is a poet, critic and novelist resident in London. Her novel Tiny Pieces of Skull won the Lambda in 2016; her recent publications include the novel Revelations and a poetic memoir The Great Good Time.

In 2018 she published original versions of the complete poems of the Roman poet Catullus with Sad Press. This interview with Henry Stead took place (in writing) in Spring 2023.

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Clare Pollard

Clare Pollard is a British poet, novelist, and playwright. Her novel Delphi, published in 2022, sets its story of pandemic lockdowns in London amid a framework of classical myth and ancient prophecy. In 2013, she published Ovid’s Heroines, her translation of the Heroides. Mythological characters and motifs also inform poems such as ‘Cassandra in Mycenae’ (Changeling, 2011). 

This interview with Joanna Paul took place in London in July 2023.

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