I.M. John Lucas, 1937-2025

By Merryn Williams

So many people are feeling miserable because John Lucas, a constant friend and with undiminished mental powers, is suddenly gone. He was 88, but he was still a ferocious worker and never wanted to slow down.

He was probably the last academic on earth who refused to use the internet. Books were his life (he also loved jazz and cricket), and he published around sixty of them, short and long: studies of Dickens, Clare, Arnold Bennett and Ivor Gurney; a memoir of the 1950s (he was an authority, too, on the 1920s and '30s); novels, poems, travels around Greece - I could go on!

But while some writers are interested only in their own careers, John constantly and enthusiastically made space for other people's work. Poets will be especially grateful to him for creating the splendid Shoestring Press in 1994. It really was run on a shoestring, and dozens of talented people were helped into print, and the press also brought a wider audience to the Georgians, Vernon Scannell and Ruth Bidgood.

John disdained the internet, instead firing off letters and postcards to all concerned (although his beloved wife Pauline did once drag him on to a Zoom). He would never have let himself be conscripted into an army or accepted a title. He loved "England, literature, cricket, criticism, history, teaching, publishing, politics, poetry, beer, jazz .... common experience, the regional and the radical, the demotic and the democratic, the poetics of saying what you mean and the politics of meaning what you say." He is going to be missed by, I do not exaggerate, hundreds of people, and I am still aching.

I don't know whether Shoestring will survive. But John's books are still there, and still worth reading, and I hope that some of us will soon be able to get together to share our memories of him.

SuAndi, "Leaning Against Time"

SuAndi, photo by Julian Kronfli

SuAndi is an Honorary Creative Writing Fellow in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. She is a writer, poet and arts practitioner born and raised in Manchester. She is the recipient of an OBE, a Doctor of Arts from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Doctor of Letters degree from Lancaster University. Her awards include the Windrush Inspirational Award, Winston Churchill Fellowship, Hope & Inspiration Award for Work Supporting Black History Month, NESTA Dream Time Fellowship, Big Issue in the North Individual Inspirational Award and the MBMEN Lifetime Award. In 2023 SuAndi was the recipient, in her hometown, of the Manchester Culture Special Recognition Award. In 2024 SuAndi was named an Honorary Fellow as well as awarded the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, in recognition of "conspicuous service to literature."

About Leaning Against Time, by SuAndi

Leaning Against Time is the first substantial selection of poems by SuAndi, whose work – as performer, writer for stage and arts curator – has recently been celebrated by the award of the Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is an honorary fellow, for services to literature across her career. The prize recognised her poems’ fierce, vividly powerful and dramatic depictions of women’s lives – in Manchester, the city she grew up in – and of Black communities and the lives of those whose voices are not often heard, even now, in contemporary British literature. In this selection, the rhythms of speech and performance echo off the page. Though she is as at home with the dramatic monologue as the lyric and the ballad, SuAndi’s poems defy easy categorisation and make visible on the page a remarkable trailblazing writing career.

You can read more about Leaning Against Time on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Leaning Against Time

Toast

She offered me toast with my tea
Not cake or biscuits
Maybe because of the hour of the day
Brewed the right way
Like my mother’s teapot
warmed first
Old ways seem odd today
Toast in three minutes
always golden
No aroma
to tempt the appetite
Cookers with grills
foil wrapped to save bacon fat
No bending backache with eyelevel vision
central heating modernised away what once was to no longer
It’s not the same
as when
One fork too heavy for the table
slightly bent by the heat
of a grate red hot with coals
browned fingers
often burnt toast
It made no difference
when laden with fridge rock hard butter
Smells of the old are different to the new
I sipped my tea and declined the marmalade

Ordinary Woman

I am an ordinary woman
Nothing special
Ordinary. Nothing. Nothing. Ordinary.
There is nothing to show
Nothing to tell
Ordinary. Nothing. Ordinary.
I have cut my hair, grown it
Cut it again. Permed it, straightened it, left it natural
Ordinary. Natural. Naturally ordinary.

I have raised children, alone
Born many, lost a few
Terminated one for my survival, sanity.
Paid the price. Murderer. Nothing. Ordinary.

Will you tell of me?
Remember me in history?
I am not a feminist made no stands
Nor have I been the discarded
Pleasure of a man.
I have loved and left. Loved and lost.
Ordinary. No different. Ordinary.

Yet without me there is no tomorrow:
No more generations;
Without me the world cannot last
From my loins – I have borne life,
Ordinary children

Grinded by a man, ordinary just like me.

Do not forget we who have fought battles
Lost and won wars
Worked hard in labour
Settled no scores;
You may go down in history,
We will simply die.
Ordinary. Nothing.
Ordinary in life. Ordinary in death. Ordinarily special.
This woman me, that man he
Please, never forget the ordinary people.

Michael Curran-Dorsano, "Where the Dead Poets Sing"

 

Originally from Minneapolis, Michael Curran-Dorsano is an international artist, whose career as an actor, writer, and teacher has spanned the globe. He’s also a proud graduate of Juilliard’s Drama Division and NUI Galway’s MA in Writing. His poetry has been published in journals such as Vox Galvia, Pendemic.ie, Smashing Times, and Spellweaver, and his debut collection Where the Dead Poets Sing will be released in February, 2026 with Wayfarer Books. On the stage and on the page, he draws from classical and contemporary influences, as well as a deep love of myth and storytelling in the bardic tradition. His website is here. 

About Where the Dead Poets Sing, by Michael Curran-Dorsano
In Where the Dead Poets Sing, an American immigrant seeks refuge in the West of Ireland as his country falls under the dark grip of fascism. Caught between the tectonic shifts of a global pandemic, an insurrection back home, the Irish housing crisis and the rise of A.I., he journeys through dreamscape, memory and song in a desperate attempt to find new meaning in a crumbling world. 

At the heart of this collection is an elegy for the dying Earth, and an ode to all the immigrants, wanderers, and lost souls who fall through the cracks. A blend of the lyrical and experimental, the mythic and the mundane, each poem is a journey toward home, divinity, and a deeper human connection in a world thrown into chaos. 

You can read more about Where the Dead Poets Sing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Where the Dead Poets Sing

To Stranger Shores

Beyond the edge of reason from starboard to port the sailor sees dream walk on dream the feverish memory of birdsong through the cycling seasons swallowed by the sea of autumn leaves that once crunched beneath his tiny feet floating free on the ocean breeze with waves curling steam cresting from the puttering engine to kiss that sacred line between darkness and light rising to join the long sleepless night as root and branch hewn and bound to form his bobbing ship drone with the sounds of the forest floor torn from fresh flowing streams now carven husks that gleam with names of those he left behind in the sunken caverns of his flickering eyes their wick charred and yearning for the dark awaits the stern the wheel of his ancestors turns again his fate their fate he knows now as the sailor plows through the unkempt braids of foam and brine of a strange new goddess

The Invisible Hand 

our violent delights 

unhinged 

with each pendulum swing, 

the stalwart bolt rattling, 

tarnished gold corroding 

the cantilever holding 

the frenzied tick-tock-tick, 

the errant flick 

of some invisible hand, 

shadows lick the walls stretching 

tall than fall, crashing 

to a skittering crawl, 

only to leap up to the stalls, 

mercy’s minister long departed there, 

only empty pews scrawled 

with tooth and claw, 

the babel of the rabble long left to rot, 

a shot rings like bell in a well, 

thunderous bellowing swells, 

bolt, nut and washer break, 

time flies with its armament, 

the shake of rafters as certain stone shatters, 

what breeds in the shadows 

when they lose their master? 

the shots fire faster, 

blood runs from the sun tipped alabaster, 

no words to speak when time and mercy sleep, 

deep sunk beneath the Church 

of this American Dream.

Matthew Paul, "The Last Corinthians"

Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in 2025, following The Evening Entertainment (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008) a Guardian book of the year, all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew is a regular reviewer, co-edited Presence haiku journal, has contributed to the Guardian’s "Country Diary" column and blogs here.

About The Last Corinthians
In a variety of forms and voices, the poems in The Last Corinthians veer psychedelically through personal, family and wider social history, pausing for quieter moments. The poems’ themes include: art, particularly by Edward Burra; class; childhood and youth; work; sexuality; fauna and flora; domesticity; sport; suburban nightlife; gardening; end of life; and, above all, the ghosts which insist on interrupting thought. 

You can read more about The Last Corinthians on the Crooked Spire Press website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Last Corinthians

Half Board at the Alum Sands Hotel Again

My brothers and I comb the whole, brown edifice,
like Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators, uncovering 
clues in a haunted house. The birdcage lift grumbles 
and judders its Meccano heave, while the intercom 
mumbles cryptic instructions for "Lemonade Doreen."

In the TV lounge, we never watch what we want to—
residents are hooked on Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm. 
We get sucked in too. At dinner, Mum orders us to stop 
fidgeting, pipe down, and not use our forks as shovels. 
The Brylcreemed, Italian waiter teases me, the youngest, 
by asking, every evening, if I’d like "some jelly ice."

Back from the beach one baking afternoon, we gawp 
as a luxury coach swings into the car park: top-flight 
Middlesbrough F.C., managed by big Jack Charlton, 
in town for a pre-season friendly versus Fourth Division 
Bournemouth, who’ve ditched "and Boscombe Athletic" 
since the printing of my bible, The Observer’s Book 
of Association Football. Takes us all week to click
 
her name is Room-maid Doreen.


Fish Loughan

Footbound by your father’s too-small gumboots,
I’m dragged by Maggie, your springer spaniel, 
to the body of water bestowing name on place.

Holly-green wavelets lap nearer every day— 
they blacken when heftier weather blimps in
from North America: Jesus-rays spoking out 
of dark cumulonimbus cracking golf-ball hail.
 
You crease up as unleashed Maggie whooshes 
across the mudbath to lump her walrus weight in, 
displacing litres as if Archimedes were watching. 

From this, I learn life’s travels are not a river, 
but a lake—a Caspian Sea, fed by rivers on all 
sides—whose antediluvian coldness harbours 
sharp-fin barracudas and red-bellied piranhas.

Harry Whitehead, "White Road"

Congratulations to Harry Whitehead, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, on the publication of his second novel, White Road!

Harry Whitehead is a novelist and director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and its annual free lit-fest, Literary Leicester. His first novel The Cannibal Spirit (Penguin) was reviewed as "powerful, brave, ambitious" (The Globe & Mail), "a unique work, compelling, complex, thought-provoking and impressive" (Quill & Quire). White Road (Claret) is his second. He’s published short stories, reviews, essays and more in a wide variety of genres. Currently, he’s writing a novel about climate change in the Himalayas. 

About White Road, by Harry Whitehead
White Road tells the story of an oil rig that explodes in the High Arctic just as winter is setting in and the environmental disaster that follows. Carrie, a Scottish-born rescue swimmer, is lost, presumed dead, after the accident. Only she can answer the questions about what really happened, but first she must find her way back to civilisation across the polar wilderness in the Arctic night.

Below, you can read a short section from the novel. Carrie is stranded on the sea ice, with a badly injured back, following an ice ridge beside open water south. The ice is rapidly breaking up after an abrupt change in the weather. And she’s about to realise the true extent of the environmental disaster unfolding somewhere out there on the dark ocean.

From White Road
Clutching the walking poles, she leaned forward to haul the heavy sled, but her back hurt so fiercely she had to crouch down instead. She pressed her fists into her temples. Squeezed through the hood, trying somehow to reduce the agony. She needed focus. At any moment, this ice slab would break free of its mooring and she’d be marooned on a crumbling, free-floating berg on the ocean.

Crying out with each step, she slogged forward over the ice’s dancing surface. Its shivering movement, the way it dropped and rose, meant her legs hardly knew what to do. Her knees gave way at the wrong moment. Her rump slammed down on her ankles, and her back exploded in anguish. 

But now the ice ridge beside her began to come apart in earnest. Fragments showered down on her. Looking up, she saw one giant slab, big as a pick-up truck, teetering one way and the other. Desperately, she picked up her pace, adrenalin numbing the physical anguish.

A tearing clamour, snaps, a series of bangs and then a sizzling rush. The weight of the sled against her harness abruptly vanished. Over her shoulder, she saw it lifted up on a wave of smashed ice and roiling water where the ridge had come down behind her. She had time to take another step before the sled whipped her legs away and she collapsed on top of it. She careered forward amid the wave’s roar. A ball of ice two feet thick whistled past her head. The water and slush-ice gushed about her body. She was screaming. 

At last, it stopped. She lay still, arched diagonally over the sled like a sacrifice across an altar. The water’s confusion subsided. Carrie fidgeted the sled harness from her waist, dragged herself to her feet. The floe she’d just escaped was turning away like some stately liner leaving dock. A mass of smaller ice chunks still cascaded down the broken ridge-end into the frothing sea.

Her arms, her body, glimmered in subtly refracting colours. For a time, she just stared at herself in fascination. She was hallucinating. Then she understood. Where the water had washed over her, she was covered in a thin film of oil.

Gregory Leadbetter, "The Infernal Garden"

 

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025). His previous books and pamphlets include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2023; Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021; The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). Recent work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). A song-cycle featuring poems from The Fetch by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy has been performed internationally, and a recording with the tenor James Gilchrist was released in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University.

About The Infernal Garden, by Gregory Leadbetter
In The Infernal Garden, Gregory Leadbetter’s poetry leads us into dark and verdant places of the imagination, the edge of the wild where the human meets the more-than-human in the burning green fuse of the living world. This liminal ground becomes a garden of death and rebirth, of sound and voice, in poems that combine the lyric with the mythic, precision with mystery.

Responding to the intricate crisis in our relationship to our planet and the life around us, the garden here assumes a haunting, otherworldly aspect, as a space of loss, grief and trial, which nonetheless carries within it the energies of regeneration and growth. At the heart of this bewitching book is the force of language itself – at once disquieting and healing – through which we are drawn to the common roots of art, science, and magic, in exquisite poetry of incantatory power.

You can read more about The Infernal Garden on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Infernal Garden

Alchemy

To separate the subtle from the gross

without injury either to spirit or body

I clip dead flowers to release the ghosts

that rise through the stem in green alchemy:

take that word, Arabic al-kimiya,

prune further, into late Greek and Coptic

to kemet, ancient Egyptian black:

the dark root of the art of elixir.

Sceptical of the power of language

to convey the quintessence of wisdom,

language itself learned how to speak hidden –

to sound both the word and its umbrage:

a darkness conducting the central fire:

a form, like a flower, for its signature.

 

Wight

A soft body rises from a forest litter

floor, damp with crumbled leaf – rises from the morning

in skins of light too cold for a sun to enter.

A body, out of place – a mushroom in the spring.

Naked, still unknowing, it wakes to naked things

in splayed and hanging shapes that people from the trees.

Their hard silence loosens: a shadow flies and sings.

The startled body moves – the thing the shadow sees.

It shivers like a man, as if the first to feel

this earthen air so close – a wound that will not heal.

Maybe a man can grow like mould from fallen wood.

He takes a step, almost – breathes and sends a pale mist

that writhes and disappears: he sees himself exist.

If someone asks, say he is born. Do not say dead.

Ruby Speechley, "Someone Else's Baby"

 

Ruby Speechley is a bestselling psychological thriller writer, whose titles include Missing, Gone, Guilty, and The Uninvited Guest. Her debut, Someone Else's Baby, was re-published by Boldwood Books in July 2025. Stolen will be her ninth novel, out in November 2025. Known for their twisty plots, relatable characters and gripping suspense, Ruby's books explore domestic issues involving trust, secrets, confessions, parenting and betrayal, alongside crimes such as abduction, blackmail, online surveillance, social media danger and murder. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Ruby came to the UK as a baby and was raised here by her English father and Portuguese mother. She moved to Cheshire during lockdown in 2020 with her husband and two of her three children (and two Springer spaniels) to be near her eldest son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. You can contact her on X: @rubyspeechley, Facebook: Ruby Speechley Author, Instagram: rubyjtspeechley, Blue Sky: rubyspeechley.bsky.social.

About Someone Else's Baby, by Ruby Speechley

She gave away her children. Now she wants them back.

Charlotte Morgan knows how it feels to desperately want a baby. As a child, seeing her mum devastated by losing her longed-for babies, Charlotte wished another woman could give her mother what she so craved.

Now Charlotte's a mum herself, and knowing how much love her daughter, Alice, brings into her life, she vows to help others achieve their dreams of becoming a parent.

When she meets Malcolm and Brenda on a surrogacy website, it seems that she's found the perfect couple. In their late forties, they have wealth and a enviable life, but there's just one thing missing: a child of their own.

When Charlotte falls pregnant with twins, the couple are overjoyed. And while Charlotte's heart breaks as she hands them over, her reward is knowing how much happiness the two tiny babies are going to bring into their life.

But are Malcolm and Brenda all they seem? As secrets become unravelled, Charlotte is forced to face that she has handed her babies over to virtual strangers. And when Malcolm and Brenda disappear without a trace, Charlotte is plunged into a frantic search for the babies she carried - before it's too late ...

You can read more about Someone Else's Baby on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From Someone Else's Baby

Prologue

She’s running as hard as she can on this cold blustery night, gasping and coughing, straining to breathe. No coat or jumper, only a torn summer dress and canvas shoes with not enough grip so she slips and stumbles towards the edge of the cliff. The black water shimmers hungrily, thundering over the pebbles as the sea comes in, rattling them like a thousand bones as it draws out again.

You call to her over and over, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t look back because she knows you’re catching her up. And when you do, you thrust your fist into her back. She falls into the night, her screams echoing around you. The thud of her landing on cold, solid rocks makes you shut your eyes for a second.

A light illuminates the tiny sunroom of a cottage down on the beach. Someone is standing at the window, watching you run away.