PIG UPDATE #39

16th of August 2026

Poetry sales are through the roof! Mostly thanks to a 2,700-year-old epic poem. Christopher Nolan's Hollywood adaptation has sparked unprecedented enthusiasm for The Odyssey and The Iliad with UK print sales for the Greek epic increasing by 1,400%! Pretty impressive for a dead poet. Since it's not every day that poetry is enjoying a moment in the limelight, PIG is celebrating Homer's achievement with a little Odyssey special. That's after the usual news on events and opportunities, of course!

Events (17 to 31 August 2026)

The fortnight opens on Monday (17 August) with Ross Wilcock's monthly Curler's Cosy Corner open mic at Curler's Rest on Byres Road. As always, it's a lovely supportive atmosphere and a great chance to road-test new work. Just sign up to read on the night.

The weekly Poet's Corner is back at Hillhead Bookclub on Tuesday, 18 August. This week's theme is 'Celestial Bodies' - inspired by the solar eclipse. What do you feel when you look into the heavens? Is there any truth to the idea that the full moon sends your shift at the bar haywire? All this and more welcome. Also on Tuesday evening, Glasgow Zine Library is hosting Disability, Creativity, Advocacy: a conversation and reading with Ellen Renton from 7pm. Ellen will share poetry and essays exploring her experience of visual impairment and will be in conversation with hearing-impaired poet Eloise Birtwhistle. Audiences are warmly invited to participate in the discussion. The event will also be live-streamed for those who can't make it in person. Tickets are on a sliding scale between £1 and £12.

On Wednesday (19 August), StoryTree is hosting its very first Poetry Open Mic at The Bungalow in Paisley. Headlining the night is the incredible Cat Cochrane, so you can be sure this is going to be an amazing night. Slots are 5-10 minutes and the event is free and beginner-friendly. So hop on the train south and be part of this brilliant event!

Cheltenham Poetry Festival's online workshop series continues on Thursday (20 August) with A Music Made of Visual Thoughts: Sonics in Poetry, led by poet Anna Saunders from 7pm. The two-hour session explores how rhythm, assonance, alliteration, line breaks and silence can inform and empower your poems, drawing on the work of Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kaveh Akbar and Liz Berry. Expect writing tasks in class and to come away with poems that sing. Tickets are £25.

The monthly Discover Poetry online reading group by Wordsworth Grasmere is back in session on Monday, 24 August. Hosted by poet Polly Atkin, it's a relaxed, friendly evening discussing a selection of classic and contemporary poems - perfect for poetry enthusiasts and complete beginners alike. And it's free!

Tuesday, 25 August is a busy one. The weekly Poet's Corner is back at Hillhead Bookclub, while earlier in the evening, the Mount Florida Books Writing Group is getting back together. If you crave some focused writing time, make sure to book a spot. Also on Tuesday night, The Midnight Verse open mic night is on at The Drake. You might want to keep an eye on the socials - I am expecting Marc Molloy to announce this month's special guest shortly. As always, the night will be recorded live and released as a podcast, and entry is free.

Wednesday (26 August) offers two great reasons to get out of the house. Ross Wilcock's monthly Poetry Experiment open mic returns to The Alchemy Experiment on Byres Road from 7:30pm. It's a lovely inclusive and supportive space for writers and performers of all levels. Tickets are £5 and performers get a free drink. Also on Wednesday evening, the Clockwork Orange Project is launching This Fire-Damaged City at the Poetry Club at SWG3 from 7pm. The publication is the result of four rounds of relay-writing events on the Glasgow Subway in which each contributor wrote for two stops before handing over to the next. The launch is free, although tickets are limited, so make sure to book your spot right away.

The fortnight closes with a double bill on Thursday (27 August). Trilleachan Press is launching A Thing So Delicate: The Hidden Voices of Scotland's Mass Concrete Viaducts at The Alchemy Experiment on Byres Road from 6:30pm. Authors Moira McPartlin and Colin Baird present a mix of history, memoir, poems, short stories, travel writing and photographs to celebrate twenty remarkable concrete arched viaducts across Scotland. Later in the evening, Not A Salon! is back in the backroom of Rufus T Firefly on Hope Street. The monthly open stage welcomes writers of all genres, styles and experience levels. Slots are 5 minutes and entry is free.

Opportunities

Today's pick from among the long list of opportunities currently on the PIG website:

Make sure not to miss Ambient Receiver's open call for its Autumn/Winter 2026 issue. This is a genuinely exciting journal focused on creative practice as a means to attune to our ecology. The editors are looking for works that explore the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds. Experimental work is very much encouraged. The deadline is 22 August.

The US-based Antiphony Journal and Press is currently accepting chapbook manuscripts for publication in 2027. The small press is looking for manuscripts of up to 12 pages. The submission window closes on 30 August.

The WayWORD Ekphrastic Poetry Prize is a lovely opportunity to flex your creative muscles and win up to £250 in the process! The competition invites writers aged 16 and over who are resident in Scotland to respond in verse to artworks featured in the University of Aberdeen's Aberdeen Artworlds exhibition. Shortlisted poems will be read at WayWORD's October festival in Aberdeen. You can enter up to two poems until 31 August.

Also closing on 31 August is is a joint call by Renard Press and t'ART Press. Chosen is a new anthology dedicated to LGBTQ+ topics such as chosen families, queer choice and trans imagination. The call is open to queer and trans writers and welcomes poetry of up to 100 lines or 750 words.

If you are a queer poet based in the UK who hasn't yet published your first collection, Inkandescent's Bold Queer Poetry Anthology is well worth a look. The anthology, which has a foreword by Jackie Kay and features established poets including Joelle Taylor, Andrew McMillan and John McCullough, is looking for ten emerging Queer Poets Future to be selected from open submission. Poems must be unpublished and a maximum of thirty lines. Selected poets will be paid and published alongside the anthology's stellar line-up. The deadline is 1 September.

Coming up on 2 September is the deadline for issue 5 of the StoryTree. Georgia and her team are looking for written work as well as visual artworks. Poets can submit up to 5 poems.

PIG Spotlight

This section is designed to shine a spotlight on a particular website, organisation or feature. For each Update, I'll pick something new - either because it is plain awesome or because it's new or really topical.

Everybody is talking about The Odyssey. Obviously, that's mostly Hollywood's fault. I am personally unlikely to read the epic's 12,109 lines of dactylic hexameter. So instead of going on too much about the old text, I thought it would be nice to showcase some of the brilliant poetry that took its inspiration from Homer. An excellent (pretty comprehensive) list is available via the website of Homer translator Emily Wilson. I picked out some of my favourites below.

Beyond these individual poems, it is also worth mentioning Derek Walcott's Omeros, probably one of the most celebrated modern responses to the Odyssey. It transplants the story to the Caribbean island of St Lucia and reimagines its characters as fishermen and villagers and weaving in the histories of colonialism and the African diaspora.

Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Nox are also worth flagging here. They both draw on classical myth and elegy in ways that feel unmistakably Homeric in spirit, even if they stray pretty far from the source.

If you want to read the original, Emily Wilson's landmark 2017 translation is the edition you want to go for. It is the first translation into English by a woman and is widely considered the finest modern English version - written in iambic pentameter. Wilson's introduction alone is worth reading for what it says about translation, gender and the choices every translator makes. In case you are on a budget, check out the various free translations available online, including audiobook version's via Librivox and this awesome comic strip rendition. I can also recommend this excellent explainer on Who was Homer via the British Museum.

PIG's Poetry Pick

In line with our Odyssey theme, I'll leave you with this lovely short poem by Louise Glück.

Telemachus’ Detachment

by Louise Glück

When I was a child looking
at my parents’ lives, you know
what I thought? I thought
heartbreaking. Now I think
heartbreaking, but also
insane. Also
very funny.

via Read A Little Poetry.

That's it from me today. See you in two weeks!

Love,
Annie