麻豆社

Paul Farley meets the Vietnamese-American poet and essayist Ocean Vuong, who was awarded the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his remarkable debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds at the 2017 Forward Prizes, and who is shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. And talks to Manchester-based Mark Pajak, a rising talent to watch, about his pamphlet Spitting Distance.

Ocean Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Harper's, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon and Warsan Shire, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers". Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst. He is currently at work on his first novel.

Mark Pajak was born in Merseyside. His work has appeared in The London Review of Books, Poetry London, The North, The Rialto and Magma. He has been awarded a Northern Writer's Award, an Eric Gregory Award, first place in The Bridport Prize and has been commended in the National Poetry Competition. His first pamphlet, Spitting Distance, was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a Laureate's Choice and is published with smith|doorstop.

Producer: Mair Bosworth.