Tindal Street Press, now an established publishing house, grew out of the Tindal Street Fiction Group, founded in 1983. With funding, the Press has now embarked on an expansion of its early publishing activities from 2002, with six fiction titles with a regional focus planned each year. Its aim is to raise Birmingham's cultural profile, showcase new writers and build a readership for good, locally set fiction.
2003 proved to be a very successful year for Tindal Street Press. They published Clare Morrall's novel Astonishing splashes of colour which went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2003. The initial print run of 2,000 copies was inadequate to meet demands generated by the publicity and eventually 50,000 copies were printed, with the rights being sold to publishers all over the world.
For more information about Tindal Street Press visit their website.
The following Tindal Street Press authors have provided biographical notes especially for this website.
1953 -
I spent all my childhood in Blackheath, a small town in the Black Country. A traditional working-class upbringing - my father worked in a factory, my mother was a cleaner - but then half-whisked out of my class by a grammar school education. Bummed around as a wannabe hippy for a few years, then bowed to the inevitable and went to university to study the history, theory and practice of theatre.
Jakarta shadows
is my first novel. I have written plays and poems since my
late-teens. I had a few poems published in little magazines, plus
entries in two anthologies of gay poetry. I staged my own play on
the Fringe in Edinburgh and a small gay group performed one of my
works at the Fighting Cocks, Moseley (with a subsequent short
tour).
I don't really have literary influences as a novelist because I almost never read novels (although dramatists and poets must have affected my work). I get a lot of inspiration from painting and the mood of certain pictures - for instance, a painting by Van Gogh of a late-night billiards bar had a mood I was trying to capture in Jakarta shadows. It wasn't a literal thing - the painting is in sickly yellows and lime-greens, whereas I see Jakarta shadows as black (and, to a lesser extent, white and grey) - but a mood or atmosphere in the painting that I want to find. I think if I could paint, I wouldn't be a writer.
© Alan Brayne, 2002
1973 -
I have lived in England since I was three months old, I grew
up in London and now live in Birmingham. Both my parents are
anti-Zionist Israeli citizens and I was born in Boston, USA, in
1973. Aged thirteen I developed an illness called Obsessive
Compulsive Disorder and much of my life since then has been
affected by my condition.
I published a novella with
Tindal Street Press in October 2000 called A lone walk,
which was very well reviewed in both the national and local press
and won the J. B. Priestley Fiction Award. For three consecutive
years I took first prize in the Koestler Awards and have also
been placed in a number of other competitions, including
Progression New Poets Competition, Fallen Leaves Competition and
The Marches Literary Prize. A number of my short stories and
poems have been published in magazines and anthologies. I was
dyslexic as a child and was unable to read a great deal for a
number of years so I am both surprised and pleased with the small
successes I have obtained through my writing. I enjoy reading
well-written books where I care about the characters, and I often
turn to a good cup of hot chocolate when miserable.
Text © Gul Y. Davis, 2002.
Photograph © Vijay Saul.
1949 -
Alan Mahar was born in Liverpool, studied in London and moved
to the West Midlands in 1976, settling in Moseley, Birmingham, where he now lives with his
wife and two daughters. During that time he has worked as a
freelance writer, editor and teacher in a variety of settings:
two universities, various further education colleges and arts
centres, as well as serving time in a graphic design studio and
an advertising agency.
He has written two novels. Flight patterns appeared in 1999 published by Gollancz. It was set in Liverpool and told the story of a French parachutist at an air show in 1957. His second novel, After the man before, was published in hardback by Methuen in June 2002 and focuses on the secrets of a terraced house in Birmingham in 1987. During the period of Birmingham's urban renewal, social worker Elizabeth decides to renovate a house with the help of an artist friend, Richard. The house's history casts a mysterious shadow across their efforts.
His short stories have appeared in London Magazine and Critical Quarterly, while his book reviews have been published in New Statesman, Literary Review and Times Literary Supplement.
Alan has recently been writer-in-residence at the Birmingham Post newspaper and organiser of the Birmingham Nouveau short story competition as well as editor of an anthology to be published in November 2002.
He is Publishing Director of Birmingham's own fiction publisher, Tindal Street Press, established in 1997 and founded Birmingham's premier writers' group Tindal Street Fiction Group, in 1982. An anthology to celebrate 20 years will be published by Tindal Street Press in 2003.
His novel in progress, Huyton suite, has won a Society of Authors research award and a 2002 Arts Council Writers' Award.
© Alan Mahar, June 2002
1961 -
Born in Walsall in 1961, I left
school at 16 to become an apprentice saddlemaker. In 1982 I began
to study part time with the Open University until, in 1986, I
moved into full-time education at Birmingham Polytechnic. In 1989
I began researching a PhD in American writing, which was
completed in 1993. I developed an interest in creative writing as
a student, initially as a means of generating extra income with
the sale of fiction to women's magazines and local papers. I also
began to publish stories and poems in literary magazines and
small press journals.
I began teaching English and American studies at the University of Wolverhampton in 1994 and since then have given lectures and papers on various aspects of American culture at universities in Europe, America and the Far East. I have an interest in American counter-culture and have written on The Beats and Generation X, but my primary field is humour and I have published work on, among others, Woody Allen, Bill Hicks, David Mamet and Philip Roth. I have a book on the latter forthcoming from Greenwich Exchange Press. I'm also interested in writing from the industrial Midlands and I'm currently working on a study of Black Country novelists, Fiction from the furnace. My love of humour and regional writing combine in my own creative work: my first novel, Surviving sting (Tindal Street Press, 2001), is a comedy set in Walsall, as is my work-in-progress novel. I was a prize-winner in the Ottakar/Faber and Faber Poetry Competition in 1998, 1999 and 2000 and my first poetry collection, The right suggestion, was published by Flarestack Press in 1999. I remain, where I arrived, in Walsall.
Tindal Street Press are to publish his second novel Kiss me softly, Amy Turtle in Spring 2004.
© Paul McDonald, 2002
1958 -
Norman Samuda-Smith was
born in Birmingham in 1958; his
parents came from Jamaica to the UK in the early 1950s. Norman
spent most of his formative years living and growing up in the
Small Heath area of the city and discovered his love of writing
when he was ten. He entertained his friends with stories about a
black football team called The Caribbean Stars based in
Birmingham, who played in the old First Division. These stories
were inspired by the 1970 Brazilian World Cup winning team
featuring the likes of Pele, Carlos Alberto, Jairzinho and
Rivalinho.
His novel Bad Friday was first published in 1982 by Trinity Arts, Birmingham, was short-listed for the Young Observer Fiction Prize in that year, and was republished by New Beacon Books, London/Port of Spain in 1985, making him the first Black British-born novelist published in Britain. During the 1980s he acted with and wrote plays for Ebony Arts Theatre Group of which he was a founder member. His latest work Rasta love is featured in an anthology of short-stories by Black and Asian writers called Whispers in the walls published by Tindal Street Press in 2001.
© Norman Samuda-Smith, 2002
Page created 9 February 2001 and last
updated 21 November 2003
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