Phil Cleaver’s beautiful letterpress prints and awards.
Andy Hayes reports back on 26’s final get together of 2024 – and on gifts given and received.
We had a great online awards evening this month topped off with a superb reading from A Christmas Carol by film, tv and theatre actor, Vincent Franklin.
Ben Jennings, one of last year’s highly commended writers, ran the Emerging Writer Award section.
In true awards style, none of the three emerging writers could be there but sent in a recording. The winner was fashion and creative writer, Anushka Shah. We loved her backstory and her poem, Plum jam / West Coast Oranges. Our other two emerging writers, Poppy Booth and Ellie Baldwin were based in Melbourne and Toronto respectively, what an international bunch we are.
Talking of which, our New Zealand chapter were well represented: Jayne Workman and Lee Ryan were highly commended for their work on 26 Forest & Bird Centennial Project. So was Mugabi Byenkya, who joined us from Phnom Penh. There was also a special mention for Harry Ashton-Key. Both Mugabi and Harry were nominated for their work in the 26 newsletter.
The Project Writer award went to Galen O’Hanlon for Man Orchid from 26 Plants. His second award. Greedy.
Sarah Farley did a great job managing the Project Writer awards. Rishi Dastidar gave a great summary of the quality of nominated work. Lisa Andrews introduced each writer, and last year’s winner, Jane Berney spoke about the work too.
Rishi also did a turn reading from his poem, commissioned by the Royal Academy, to respond to a piece in the Michael Craig-Martin exhibition. And Fiona Thompson ran an automatic writing session accompanied by the harp.
Once again, thank you to Quietroom and Martin Clarkson at Storytime for supporting the awards. And to our friend, master typographer and designer, Phil Cleaver, for creating the beautiful letterpress prints and awards.
– Andy Hayes