Ambit Pop 243 2021 Spring

This is the debut AMBIT POP, the 243rd edition of Ambit. This new strand sees maverick artists invited to guest edit AMBIT under our tradition of Poems, Stories, Art.

Ambit is delighted to collaborate with Lias Saoudi, whose frontman duties in the notorious South London-band, Fat White Family, who could be described as a contemporary The Clash, or in his own words, “genre-bending iconoclasts”.  

Lias began writing more than songs in lockdown, his work published in the online journal of The Social caught the attention of AMBIT’s new Managing Editor, Kirsty Allison, who met him at a secret Fat White Family show in Berlin, on a night off from her residency, at the end of 2020, where the author Rob Doyle was playing percussion.

“I see AMBIT POP as the younger sister to Ambit,”

explains Stephen Barrett, who came on board as Designer, on recommendation by Mireille Fauchon, our Illustration Editor.  Barrett is the lead tutor in typography at London’s Central St. Martins. His eyes are working across Ambit Pop, and our two volumes of unsolicited submissions each year, which are selected by our editors. We will be publishing two Pops a year, the second in October, featuring the winners of our Annual Competition, this year opening across genres for the first time: Poems, Stories and Art, and judged by Deborah Levy, Kim Addonizio and Michael Salu.

AMBIT POP features: cover art by Marco Livingstone, an oulipo exchange with Rob Doyle (Bloomsbury), and exclusive short stories from Benjamin Myers (two of which we will share here online in the run up to publication).  There’s also a new short story by the wonderful Adelle Stripe, and poetry from acclaimed Scottish author Jenni Fagan.  Art comes from the phenomenal visions of Steven Allan, Anna McDowell, and Wayne Horse, there’s also the purple poetry of Jeremy Reed, illustrated by his frequent collaborator Neal Fox (Le Gun), and new poetry from Zaffar Kunial, Connor Seed, Nina Power, Vida Adamczewski and Niall Griffiths.