Rebecca Tamás
British poet and academic (born 1988)
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Rebecca Tamás (born 1988)[1] is a British poet, writer, critic, and editor. She is the daughter of Hungarian philosopher and public intellectual Gáspár Miklós Tamás.
Rebecca Tamás | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1988 (age 37–38) London, England |
| Alma mater | University of Warwick and University of Edinburgh and University of East Anglia |
| Occupations | Poet, writer, critic, editor |
| Writing career | |
| Genres | Poetry, essays |
Tamás studied creative writing at the University of Warwick and at the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Grierson Verse Prize,[2] before completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia.[1] She is a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University, where she co-convenes The York Centre for Writing Poetry Series.[3]
Work
Tamás is the editor, with Sarah Shin, of the anthology Spells: 21st-century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press, 2018).[4] She has published three pamphlets of poetry: The Ophelia Letters (Salt, 2013), Savage (Clinic, 2017) and Tiger (Bad Betty Press, 2018), and the full-length poetry collection Witch (Penned in the Margins, 2019). The poet and journalist Ben Wilkinson, writing in The Guardian, said that Witch "has caused a stir, and it's not hard to see why".[5] Tamás has been described in this is tomorrow magazine as "crafting a world of linguistic ritual and transformation around her".[6] In 2020, she published the prose collection Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman.[7][8][9] MAP Magazine commissioned three responses from artists to the book.[10]
The composer Freya Waley-Cohen has set eight poems from WITCH to music: the first complete performance of Spell Book took place at Milton Court in London on 1 February 2024.[11] Waley-Cohen's opera WITCH, with libretto by Ruth Mariner, was inspired by the Rebecca Tamás collection of the same name.[12] It was staged at the Royal Academy of Music in 2022, and at Longborough Festival Opera the same year.[13][14] Waley-Cohen has said that she was attracted to the way Tamás's "language flips between shocking and beautiful, catching your attention and making you see something shocking in a new light".[12]
Tamás's writing has appeared in publications including London Review of Books,[15] Financial Times,[16] The Poetry Review, The White Review,[17] The Guardian,[18] ArtReview,[19] and Frieze.[20]
Tamás was the joint winner of the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize.[2][21]
Awards
- 2016: Joint winner, Manchester Poetry Prize[21]
- 2017: Fenton Arts Trust Emerging Writer Award[22]
- 2017: Joint winner, London Review of Books Bookshop Pamphlet of the Year[23]
Works
Poetry
- The Ophelia Letters (Salt Publishing, 2013) ISBN 9781844719525[24]
- Savage (Clinic, 2017) ISBN 9780993318245[25][26]
- Tiger (Bad Betty Press, 2018)
- WITCH (Penned in the Margins, 2019) ISBN 9781908058621[27][28]
Essays
- Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman (Makina Books, 2020) ISBN 9781916060890