Proverse Publication Prize Series

David, a lonely elderly struggling novelist, contacts Hilary, with whom he has a friend in common, via Facebook, and an unlikely friendship develops via a series of messages. The two begin to share details of their past and current lives. Hilary is a solo mother with two children. One of the children has Down's Syndrome and the other has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Both are struggling. David, who suffers from agoraphobia, is wrestling with his sixth novel, and is under pressure from a publisher to complete it. Hilary feels the pressure of raising two young children alone, whilst also trying to complete a distance degree./Although they are on opposite sides of the world (David in London and Hilary in New Zealand), the two provide support and friendship for one another via their messages. Each shares secrets from their past./Through a series of messages, Hilary and David share their thoughts on life, the universe, men, women and everything else in between and provide companionship and advice for one another. "Absolutely unputdownable. Once you commence reading this England-New Zealand based novel you will find yourself carried on quickly via the impelling momentum generated by all the relationship and emotional hassles the two main characters have in their distinct yet interwoven lives on two sides of the World. Well-written. Interesting. Clever. Well done, Laura Solomon." —Vaughan Rapatahana, author of the poetry collection, Home, Away, Elsewhere (2011) "I found myself caught up in the story and read the book in one sitting." — Member, International Proverse Prize 2010 Judging Panel "A nice one or two-day holiday read" – Helen Watson White, "Making a connection", Sunday Star Times, Auckland, New Zealand, 22 January 2012.

Norcliffe professes not to be a confessional poet; nevertheless he freely acknowledges that places and people served as prompts for the poems. New Zealand based, Norcliffe is well-travelled and his poems have international resonance. Placing Shadow Play with one other poetry collection as a finalist for the annual international Proverse Prize in 2011, the judging panel (reviewing entries with no knowledge of the writers) found an expert hand behind a wide variety of well-wrought poems on a range of topics, pleasingly interwoven with literary allusions.  "Though the 'ordinary world' most of these poems inhabit is rich with the familiar—ATMs, case managers, vindaloo—what James Norcliffe finds there is far from typical. And when he turns his considerable imagination up a notch, setting a giraffe on the Russian steppe, say, or exploring the largest statue of a strawberry in the world, the results have the surprise and gleam of the truly extraordinary. Shadow Play is a treasure chest of fresh, insightful work."—Don Bogen, poet and editor of the Cincinnati Review, USA. "James Norcliffe is part bar wag, part trapeze artist, and every bit the literary raconteur. He wields his imagination like a spot welder, spraying out glowing trails of hot sparks. And yet so much in these pages happens in slo-mo, in fractured memory. There are poems for cartographers and window washers, personae poems for Hamlet, Alice in Wonderland, and sadistic Empress Dowager Cixi, love poems for books, ATMs, and vindaloo. But his great poem for the Icthyosaurus -- "not one centimetre / of human history in the / kilometres of its eyes" -- exposes the slinky sinister undertow at work. Suicide, heart attacks, suicide bombers, and auto da fe suck us in. Norcliffe pokes and prods the reader like a forensic tech and in the end his poems leave spatter patterns."—Richard Peabody, poet, novelist, and editor of Gargoyle Magazine, USA.

In MAN'S LAST SONG, Tam’s first full-length novel the human race faces imminent extinction. The year is 2090. The global population has shrunk to less than half a million; median age about sixty. After forty years of near-universal sterility, humanity is vanishing while the rest of the planet makes a healthy comeback. A few survivors in Hong Kong face the challenge of adjusting to life as post-modern savages, rediscovering instincts that have long been suppressed by civilization. To these post-modern cavemen and cavewomen dwelling in the concrete remains of an empty metropolis, life has become a lonely journey of self-discovery in which they reassess also mankind. Their relationships with nature, each other, and themselves have fundamentally changed. The dilemma, pain and pleasure of love, friendship, compassion, ageing, and loneliness have been heightened by pragmatic dictates. The unknowable - God, Dao, death, even reality - has assumed new and shifting dimensions in man's dying world. How did Homo sapiens reach this dire situation? Looking back with hindsight borrowed from the future, readers may join characters in this book in finding today's world absurd, even suicidal. Others may hang on tenaciously to one thing that has not changed: hope. The author, JAMES TAM, was born in Hong Kong. He lived and studied in Canada in the 70s and returned to Hong Kong in the mid-80s to work as an environmental engineer and started his own environmental engineering practice. In 2008, he realised his long-term plan to leave business before too late, and sat down to write. As a scientific realist often mistaken for a morbid cynic, he sees abundant evidence that 21st Century Homo sapiens is a delusional and self-endangered species. Nevertheless, he remains irrationally optimistic.

In this collection of poetry, written over half a lifetime, Hayley Ann Solomon focuses primarily on the pursuit of excellence, immortality achieved through finite life, love in all its forms, and social justice. As it waxes and wanes, the collection cycles through sequences of lyrical ballads, sonnets, elegies, haiku, snippets of nonsensical verse; all blended with a substantial dose of existential philosophy and social comment. The collection covers a full spectrum, from the darkest psycho-social moments, to zeniths of absolute joy. The liberal use of consonance, assonance, alliteration, echoes and half-echoes, rhyme and cross-rhyme make for a style rich in sound-play. This, together with strong metrical awareness – very often iambic or trochaic pentameter and tetrameter – evokes a flow that is quite typically euphonic. There is therefore a sense of lyricism despite a broad diversity of topics and moods. The anthology evolves to become a promise of regeneration, in synchrony with the phases of the moon, from which it takes its celestial title. 

Under the shade of the feijoa trees offers a representative sample of Hayley Ann Solomon’s particular brand of high quality, emotionally resonant short stories. The styles and intensities vary extensively, but the common denominator is humanity in all its complexity, woven with philosophy. “This eclectic and very personal collection of short stories by successful writer of genre fiction and emerging poet, Hayley Ann Solomon, describes in lyrical detail widely dispersed places and situations. The stories are well-constructed and intensely-felt and the author’s joy in the sounds and sequencing of beautiful words is evident.”—Philip Chatting, Winner of the Proverse Prize 2014, author of The Snow Bridge and Other Stories (Proverse, 2015). Hayley Ann Solomon is an award winning author and poet.  A Librarian by training, Hayley has been a full time author for some years, winning repeated recognition in commercial genre fiction. In 2017—a new departure—her first poetry collection, Celestial Promise, received a Proverse Publication Prize. She travelled to Hong Kong for the launch of her book in November 2017 and was interviewed on Radio Television Hong Kong on Phil Whelan’s Morning Brew programme.

Nick Powell, arriving in Hong Kong with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Lennox, finds himself drawn into the political machinations affecting the city as the Occupy movement of 2014 takes root. A fatal accident exposes the factions vying for control of the SAR and gives Nick the second chance desired by many Hong Kong expats. Will he make the most of the opportunity, or find himself on the wrong side of history? Shifting between a variety of unique voices, HONG KONG ROCKS (a Hong Kong Proverse Prize finalist) is part thriller, part creative exploration of the challenges facing a special administrative region punching above its weight. Though rooted in experience and influenced by real-life events, this novel represents an alternative version of Hong Kong’s recent history and takes regular liberties within this parallel world for the benefit of satire. The book was completed after the Occupy protests of 2014 but before the escalation of protests in the territory beginning June 2019, the action taking place in a notional 2018. —Peter Humphreys, Author.

A Gateway Has Opened is a poetry collection by Hong Kong-based poet, LIAM BLACKFORD, containing 36 missives on truth and reality, anger and rage, complexity and change, and power as manifested in people, corporations, governments, borders and cultures. The poems inhabit a chaotic and psychedelic world where water flows into the sky, nightclubs have hundreds of floors and where banks and malls publish theories on knowledge and personhood. Therein, human society is fraught with harm and violence but also euphoric with the widening horizons of possibility. The collection is notable for its strict adherence to a unique poetic form (each poem has six stanzas, each stanza with six lines, and each line with six syllables), which in its red-eyed absoluteness suggests that the poems are giving voice to an alien, an angel or a machine. Though avant-garde and philosophical, the collection is highly reflective of the poet’s place and time, in which Hong Kong is at the epicentre of epochal political and cultural change. “The poems ... ‘quiver with tension’ as the speaker straddles the liminal space between dreams and the mundane.” —Ryan Fenton. “In Blackford’s verse, one is in our world, with its political and environmental anxieties, with its affluence and parallel unease.”―Andrew S. Guthrie, Proverse Prize Finalist 2013. “... what bubbles beneath the surface is the courage to find astounding beauty and inspiration amidst confounding and cruelty, and hold them both.” —Jack Mayer, Winner of the Proverse Prize 2019. “...unique explorations of poetic form.”—Philip Mead, Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia.  “Blackford’s worlds are jarring and harsh; psychedelic yet pungent with our reality. His strict form is muscular and fascinating. Gateway seethes with energy – I loved it.”―David West, Western Australia.