Welcome to The Shipwrights Review
A poet, a musician, and a teacher walk into a shipyard…
Actually, they’re one and the same person.
Malmö University was founded as a university college, Malmö Högskola, in 1998 on the grounds of an old shipyard at the heart of the port city of Malmö. From that site, the school has played a leading role in the reemergence and transformation of the city from an industrial town into a center of learning, culture, and innovation.
Some years later, Darius Degher, our poet, musician, and teacher, set foot in the former shipyard, built Sweden’s most popular creative writing program in English, and launched a diaspora of writers and poets of multiple nationalities, who like the vessels crafted by Malmö’s shipwrights of yore, started to spread around the world.
From 2008 to 2019, the Shipwrights Review was their touchstone. Publishing in Shipwrights became a rite of passage after which each one could rightfully claim the title of author. Unfortunately, due to changes in the administration at Malmö University, Darius had to leave his position, and Shipwrights was lost. For a time. But that’s what we are here to change, and I couldn’t be more excited to have Shipwrights’ founding editor Darius Degher onboard.
To my fellow alumni of Malmö University’s creative writing program who published in the original Shipwrights, I look at you in awe. How I wish to have had the courage to submit. In particular, I want to say a special thanks to those of you who have helped by publishing your original texts on this new platform.
To our new Shipwrights readers, I hope you enjoy this initial batch of poems and stories. There are quite a few more where these came from — Shipwrights’ ten-years’ worth of archives.
And very soon we plan to open this publication to new submissions and reinstate Shipwrights’ crown jewel: the Conrad-Nabokov Prize for best submission by a non-native writer in English.
But that’s just the start. I can’t wait to share more of our plans with you.
