The first instalment of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.
With Astrid Alben, Rachael Allen, Theis Anderson, Rowland Bagnall, Tara Bergin, Emily Berry, Crispin Best, Paul Buck, Jen Calleja, Thomas A Clark & Laurie Clark, Esmé Creed-Miles, Emily Critchley, Jake Elliott, Laura Elliott, SJ Fowler, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Amy Key, Michael Kindellan, Caleb Klaces, Gareth Damian Martin, Robert Herbert McClean, Kirstie Millar, Catrin Morgan, Richard Price, Leonie Rushforth, Rachel Snowdon, Rebecca Tamás, Ollie Tong, Kandace Siobhan Walker Ahren Warner, Stephen Watts, Ralf Webb, Eley Williams, Alison Honey Woods and Madeleine Wurzburger
Astrid Alben is a poet, editor and translator. Her debut collection Ai! Ai! Pianissimo was published by Arc in 2011. She is a Rijksakademie Amsterdam Fellow and was awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in 2014. Her poems, essays, translations and reviews have been widely published, including in the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto and The Poetry Review. Her poetry is translated into Romanian, Dutch, Slovenian, Maltese and Chinese. She is currently Director of the Poetry Translation Centre.
Paul Buck has been writing and publishing since the late Sixties; key titles include Violations, Lust, Walking into Myself… His work is characterized by its sabotaging of the various forms in order to explore their overlaps and differences. Through the Seventies he also edited the seminal magazine Curtains, with its focus on threading French writing from Bataille, Blanchot, Jabès, Faye, Noël, Ronat, Collobert and a score of others into a weave with English and American writers and artists.
While editing and translating are still a daily activity – in partnership with Catherine Petit, the Vauxhall&Company series of books at Cabinet Gallery is their responsibility – he also continues to cover new ground: Spread Wide, a fiction generated from his letters with Kathy Acker; Performance, a biography of the Cammell/Roeg film; Lisbon, a cultural view of a city; A Public Intimacy, strip-searching scrapbooks to expose autobiography; Disappearing Curtains, an exhibition catalogue that collides with a ‘journal’; Library, a suitable case for treatment, a collection of essays. In recent times he helped Laure Prouvost to write her film Deep See Blue Surrounding You, around which her Venice Biennale pavilion, representing France, was based.
Further ventures through textual issues around transgression, perversity, and intimacy to appear include: Indiscretions (& Nakedness), a set of prose narratives; Street of Dreams, further essays, and Without You, a fiction that voyages through film essay.
Jen Calleja is a poet, writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine, and Best British Short Stories (Salt). She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on debut novel Vehicle (Prototype, 2023), an excerpt of which was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize. Jen’s short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For was published by Prototype in 2020, and Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode was published by Rough Trade Books in 2024. An excerpt from Fair was Longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text.
Jen has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library. Jen is co-founding editor of Praspar Press and played and toured in the DIY punk band Sauna Youth.
Emily Critchley is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Arrangements (Shearsman, 2018), Ten Thousand Things (Boiler House Press, 2017) and a selected writing: Love / All That / & OK (Penned in the Margins, 2011). She also writes critically on poetry, philosophy and feminism and is the editor of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street, 2016) and co-editor of #MeToo: A Poetry Collective (Chicago Review, Summer, 2018). Critchley is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich. She lives in London with her daughter.
Michael Kindellan is a Canadian-born poet and scholar. He lives in Berlin with partner Julia and their daughters Greta and Agnes.
