Sheenagh Pugh
{{short description|British poet, novelist and translator (born 1950)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2016}}
{{Use British English|date=October 2016}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Sheenagh Pugh
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| image = File:Sheenaghpugh.jpg
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| caption = Pugh in 2008
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| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|df=y|1950|12|20}}
| birth_place = Birmingham, England
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| occupation = Poet, novelist, translator
| language = English
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| period = 1977–
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| notableworks = {{Plainlist |
- Stonelight (2000)}}
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| awards = {{Plainlist |
- Wales Book of the Year, 2000}}
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| website = {{URL|www.sheenagh.wixsite.com/sheenaghpugh}}
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Sheenagh Pugh (born 20 December 1950) is a British poet, novelist and translator who writes in English.James Persoon and Robert R. Watson (2015). "Pugh, Sheenagh", Encyclopedia of British Poetry: 1900 to the Present, Infobase Learning. Her book, Stonelight (1999) won the Wales Book of the Year award.
Pugh was born in Birmingham. She was a creative writer educator at the University of Glamorgan until her retirement. She has written several poetry collections, and two novels. She has also written The Democratic Genre: fan fiction in a literary context (2005), a literary study of fan fiction.
Life
Pugh was born in Birmingham.{{cite web|url=http://theislandreview.com/content/poetry-sheenagh-pugh|title=Poetry: Sheenagh Pugh|date=10 January 2014|website=The Island Review|access-date=9 July 2020}} She studied languages at the University of Bristol. She now lives in Shetland but lived for many years in Cardiff and taught creative writing at the University of Glamorgan until retiring in 2008.{{cite book|author=Cecil Day-Lewis|title=Contemporary Poets|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UIQPAQAAMAAJ|year=1991|publisher=St. James Press|isbn=978-1-55862-035-3|page=774}} Her collection of poetry, Stonelight (1999) won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2000. She has twice won the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Her collection of poetry The Beautiful Lie (Seren, 2002) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the collection The Movement of Bodies (Seren, 2005) was selected as a Poetry Book Society recommendation and also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Pugh's interest in northern landscapes is well-known and a strong feature of her work. One of her novels, Kirstie's Witnesses, is set in Shetland and several poems in Long-Haul Travellers are set in Norway.
Her poem "Sometimes" (Selected Poems, 1990) appeared in Poems on the Underground and is among her best-known works, though Pugh herself states on her website that she "long ago got sick of it"[http://sheenagh.webs.com/sometimes.htm The Dreaded Sometimes: Sheenagh Pugh's website] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090921035431/http://sheenagh.webs.com/sometimes.htm |date=21 September 2009 }} (accessed 28 June 2007) and no longer allows it to be anthologised or used in examination questions. Politically correct versions of this poem using inclusive language have been published, ruining the scansion and raising Pugh's ire.
Pugh has also published a study of fan fiction, The Democratic Genre: fan fiction in a literary context (Seren, 2005), which is one of the first publications to treat fan fiction as a literary rather than a sociological phenomenon. Fandom is also the subject of her 'Fanfic' sequence, in the collection The Beautiful Lie, which includes a poem about Mary Sues.
Pugh's collection Long-Haul Travellers was published by Seren in Autumn 2008. It features several poems set in Norway and a sequence about the Dutch privateer turned Barbary pirate Murat Reis.[http://sheenagh.webs.com/longhaultravellers.htm Sheenagh Pugh: Long-Haul Travellers] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091030015138/http://sheenagh.webs.com/longhaultravellers.htm |date=30 October 2009 }} (accessed 26 April 2008) Long-Haul Travellers was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize and longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year prize.
Pugh has since published Short Days, Long Shadows in 2014 and Afternoons Go Nowhere, 2019, both from Seren.
Works
=Poetry=
- Crowded by Shadows (1977)
- What a Place to Grow Flowers (1979)
- Earth Studies and Other Voyages (1982)
- Beware Falling Tortoises (1987)
- Sing for the Taxman (1993)
- Id's Hospit (1997)
- Stonelight (1999)
- The Beautiful Lie (2002)
- The Movement of Bodies (2005)
- Long-Haul Travellers (2008)
- Later Selected Poems (2009)
- Short Days, Long Shadows (2014){{cite web|url=http://theislandreview.com/content/three-shetland-poems-by-sheenagh-pugh|title=Three Shetland poems by Sheenagh Pugh|date=4 May 2018|website=The Island Review|access-date=2 July 2021}}
- Afternoons Go Nowhere (2019)
=Poetry anthologies=
- Selected Poems (1990)
- What If This Road and Other Poems (2003)
=Novels=
- Kirstie's Witnesses (1998)
- Folk Music (1999)
=Translation=
- Prisoners of Transience (1985)
=Nonfiction=
- The Democratic Genre (2005)
All published by Seren except Kirstie's Witnesses, published by the Shetland Publishing Company, and What If This Road and Other Poems, published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.
References
External links
- [http://sheenagh.wix.com/sheenaghpugh Sheenagh Pugh's website]
- [http://sheenaghpugh.livejournal.com/ Sheenagh Pugh's blog]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20070411044732/http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=authC2D9C28A13ff01BA37RjM2B357B8 British Council - Arts: Sheenagh Pugh]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20070612234706/http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/journalissues/vol5/pugh.html Pugh S (2004) The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media vol. 5]—republished in The Democratic Genre
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20160303171203/http://www.academi.org/news/i/134026/ Academi]
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Category:20th-century English novelists
Category:20th-century English poets
Category:21st-century English poets
Category:20th-century English women writers
Category:21st-century English women writers
Category:English women novelists
Category:Anglo-Welsh women poets
Category:Writers from Birmingham, West Midlands