Joining the damned and despised literati

The American poet Ezra Pound described the literati as "damned and despised" while the Serbian poet Dejan Stojanović wrote: “There are too many literati, yet very few are smart; knowledge is acquired far too easily.” Well, I don't care because, it seems, I've now officially joined the literati...

I was delighted recently to receive an email from Emerald Publishing. They manage a portfolio of over 300 academic journals, including the 'Journal of Public Mental Health'. At the end of last year, the journal published an article of mine called 'Enhancing public mental health and wellbeing through creative arts participation'. The process of working on this particular article was more fraught than usual because my wife had been seriously ill that summer and had been undergoing treatment when I was, somewhat distractedly, asked to make pre-publication revisions to the article! 

So you can imagine how surprised and thrilled I was to hear from Emerald that the article had achieved recognition as an Outstanding Paper in the 2019 Emerald Literati Awards. Over the last thirty years I've had around 100 articles published in various journals and magazines but I've never received an award for any of them prior to this, so it means a lot to me. 

I'd like to give my sincere thanks to the journal's editor Professor Woody Caan and to the editorial board. The award-winning article has been made freely available for twelve months so it can be widely shared with networks and colleagues and you can read the full text of the paper here.