Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter by Sarah Mnatzaganian and Guerilla Brightenings by Joanna Nissel will be launched in the spring. Both books are now available for pre-order from our shop.
Sarah Mnatzaganian up in rural Wiltshire and in her late teens spent each summer with her father’s family in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem. She studied English at Oxford University and Byzantine Art History at the Courtauld Institute. Sarah worked as an editor, teacher and freelance journalist before co-founding a cello business with her husband Robin Aitchison in Ely, where they brought up their two children. Her poems have been widely published in literary magazines including The North, Poetry Wales and The Rialto. She won first prize in the Spelt Poetry Competition in 2021
Joanna first discovered poetry through the gateway drug of prose poetry while at Bath Spa University. She has since been the runner up for the Poetry Business New Poets Prize, ‘Pick of the Month’ for Ink, Sweat and Tears, and won the Bangor Literary Journal 2020 Ekphrastic Competition. Joanna is completing a PhD in ‘Mentoring in the Contemporary UK Poetry Ecology’ at University of Southampton.
Against the Grain Poetry Press 