Our guest editors for issue #18: Rosamund Taylor and Molly Hennigan

We’re thrilled to welcome two guests to our editorial team for Banshee issue #18 (autumn/winter 2024). Award-winning poet Rosamund Taylor will helm the poetry section, while acclaimed essayist Molly Hennigan will edit the issue’s non-fiction. They will join fiction editor John Patrick McHugh and flash fiction editor Marie Gethins on the issue #18 masthead.

Rosamund Taylor is the winner of the Telegraph Poetry Prize 2023, The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2020 and the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry 2017. In 2023, her debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection and the Yeats Society Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Her essays have recently appeared in The Irish Times and The Stinging Fly, and individual poems in Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Mslexia, The Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review, and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and RTE radio. She says:

I look for poems that take me somewhere unexpected. Poems don’t have to be an exact account of events; they are not journalism: they reach for a deeper truth that cannot be found anywhere else. In her essay, ‘Against Sincerity’, Louise Glück says, ‘The source of art is experience, the end product the truth, and the artist, surveying the actual, constantly intervenes and manages, lies and deletes, all in service of truth.’ Our work as poets then is to find a way to that complicated truth, while leaving space to hold contradiction, uncertainty, despair, and hope. In Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, the character Billy Bigchin says, ‘A metaphor is a kind o’ lie to help people understand what’s true.’ That’s what I look for: an imaginative lie that allows a poem to reveal something I’ve never noticed before. A poet’s careful attention and dexterity explore a universal truth through metaphor or imagination. Vampires and dwarves, toothache and heartbreak, and all the specificities of an individual life, guide us on this journey.

Molly Hennigan is an Irish writer and editor living in Galway. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Tolka and The Pig’s Back. Her first book The Celestial Realm was nominated for the An Post Irish Book Awards Newcomer of the Year. Molly is currently working on her first novel. She says:

I am thrilled to be guest non-fiction editor for the upcoming autumn issue of Banshee and I’m really looking forward to reading submissions and working with writers on their essays. The most important thing I look for in an essay is a strong voice. Regardless of what happens in the piece, I want to be drawn in by the specificity of the voice. The writing doesn’t have to be personal but the exigence does. I think something often clicks naturally when a writer is clear about their intention and, without them stating it explicitly, I like to come away as a reader with a strong feeling about that intention too. I also like risk-taking! Formulaic essay-writing that includes a staid combination of an Oxford English Dictionary definition of a word, followed by an emotional reaction, followed by a brief epiphany about the two as they are interlinked can circle the drain a little. Not only for the reader but the writer too. I’d love to read submissions that are really ambitious, surprising and full of feeling.

Submissions for issue #18 will be open from 1-31 March 2024 – check out our submission guidelines here!