Carmen Marcus
Carmen Marcus is a published author, poet, playwright, creative facilitator, and mentor. As the daughter of a Yorkshire fisherman and Irish chef her writing brings together the practical and the magical. Her play AND THE EARTH OPENED UP UNDER HER won the Faber New Play Award 2023. Her debut novel HOW SAINTS DIE was published by Vintage in 2018, it won New Writing North’s Northern Promise Award and was long listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Daisy Johnson describes it as a ‘glorious, beautiful sea shanty of a book.’ Her poetry has been commissioned by BBC Radio, The Royal Festival Hall, Durham Book Festival and Apples and Snakes. She was named as a BBC Verb New Voice 2015. In August 2022 she was chosen as one of the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain’s recipients of the New Play Commission Scheme.
As a community artist Carmen works with creative and cultural organisations to support communities to tell their stories their way. She’s made poetry for Storylines, inspired by conversations on trains and been the voice of a giant Redwood tree.
She regularly runs writing workshops on subjects that range from creating dangerously to mythic underworlds. She has been a guest lecturer at the Universities of Leicester, Northumbria and Teesside and has been invited to speak by Penguin Random House and the Northern Writers’ Conference.
Having made the journey from council estate to the bookshelves Carmen is dedicated to supporting working class writers to tell their stories.
Carmen is currently working on her play and reading for a PhD at the University of Teesside which asks – what is the role and responsibility of the storyteller within the community.
She strives in her work to live up to the words of her first and most influential critic, her primary school teacher, ‘weird, minus one house-point.’
carmenmarcus.co.uk