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    Sift: Memories of Childhood
    Sift: Memories of Childhood
    Sift: Memories of Childhood
    Ebook181 pages2 hours

    Sift: Memories of Childhood

    By Lawrence Sail

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    About this ebook

    Sift is the memoir of writer and poet Lawrence Sail's formative years in post-war Exeter. Sail paints a wonderfully evocative picture of British life in the 1940s and 50s, while exploring the richness and bafflements of a child's life. Most families know the true history of time and chance the sift of who and what survives, what is spoken of or glossed over; the stubborn objects outliving their owners passion for them; the oddities of fashion; the co-editing of memory, forgetfulness and the need to forget...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJeffrey Collyer
    Release dateSep 29, 2021
    ISBN9781907605253
    Sift: Memories of Childhood
    Author

    Lawrence Sail

    Lawrence Sail was born in London and brought up in Exeter. He studied French and German at Oxford University, then taught for some years in Kenya, before returning to teach in the UK. He is now a freelance writer and lives in Exeter. His retrospective Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, covers work written over four decades, drawing on poems from ten collections, from Opposite Views (1974) to the New Poems (2010) first collected in this volume. It includes poems from four books previously published by Bloodaxe, Out of Land: New & Selected Poems (1992), Building into Air (1995), The World Returning (2002), and Eye-Baby (2006). He has since published a later collection, The Quick (2015), to be followed by Guises in February 2020. His other books include Cross-currents: essays (Enitharmon, 2005), a memoir of childhood, Sift (Impress Books, 2010), and Songs of the Darkness, a selection of his Christmas poems with illustrations by his daughter, Erica Sail (Enitharmon, 2010). He has edited a number of anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (1999) and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems (2005), both co-edited with Kevin Crossley-Holland for Enitharmon, and First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (Faber & Faber, 1988). He also edited South-West Review from 1980 to 1985. He was chairman of the Arvon Foundation from 1990 to 1994. In 1991 he was programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and a judge for the Whitbread Book of the Year awards. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1992, and an Arts Council Writer’s Bursary the following year. In August 1993 he undertook a month-long tour of India for the British Council, for whom he has since worked as visiting writer and lecturer in various countries, including Bosnia, Colombia, Egypt, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine. From 1994 to 1996 he was the British representative on the jury of the European Literature Prize, and from 2004 to 2007 a judge of the Eric Gregory Awards. In October 1999 he was a co-director of the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature. In 2004 he received a Cholmondeley Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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