Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal restructures as ACE awards grant

Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal has restructured after securing its first grant from Arts Council England.

Having previously run the magazine as a voluntary project, Naush Sabah will now formally take up a position as editor and publishing director, with Adrian B Earle returning to the team as editorial assistant, and Suna Afshan now editor-at-large.

Poetry Birminham is Birmingham's only dedicated print periodical of poetry, and was founded as a quarterly in 2019. It now publishes new work in poetry and criticism biannually. The award from ACE will support production of the next two issues of the magazine, enabling the journal to continue publishing for the rest of 2021.

Commenting on the grant, Sabah said: “I’m thrilled to have this support from ACE, and it comes at a really crucial time for Poetry Birmingham. I’m incredibly proud of what we managed to achieve up until now as an unfunded voluntary project, particularly during the pandemic, which has been an incredibly testing time for everyone. The grant will enable us to bring more of our exciting vision for developing the magazine to fruition with ambitious, bold and creative commissioning and publishing. We sought to create something that has a distinctive character with Poetry Birmingham. It’s a publication that’s proudly rooted in Birmingham and its cultural heritage, but also deeply interested global poetries and translation too. It’s a space which champions the regional, the underrepresented, and the new in poetry, while engaging with the traditional and canonical.”

In 2020, the journal was shortlisted in the Best Magazine category of the Saboteur Awards. Issue six of the journal will be published in the next few months, and will feature work from poets including Sascha Akhtar, Liz Berry, Jason Allen-Paisant, Yomi Sode and April Yee.