Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Gerri Kimber, "Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life"

Dr Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is the author or co-editor of over 40 books and has contributed chapters to many other volumes. She has published widely in numerous journals, notably for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was President of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–2020). Gerri has made a number of media appearances on national radio and television in both the UK and New Zealand and has been invited as a keynote speaker all over the world. In 2014 she was runner-up for the title of UK New Zealander of the Year for her services to New Zealand culture. Her new biography Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life has just been published by Reaktion Books.

About Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, by Gerri Kimber 
Katherine Mansfield has not been short of biographers since her death in 1923, but this latest biography offers a new focus, where the complicated bond between Mansfield and her husband, John Middleton Murry, is fully revealed for the first time, demonstrating how it was far from the loving relationship superficially portrayed in most of their letters, when Mansfield tended to obscure what she was actually feeling. As time went by, and their literary fame grew, both she and Murry became more acutely aware of posterity and publication – as evidenced in Murry’s bowdlerised early editions of Mansfield’s letters. In addition, there was another complication in their relationship, overlooked by most biographers until now, and that is the covert, long-term bond between Mansfield and the editor of the New Age, A. R. Orage, which, as this biography reveals, truly came to define her life – both artistic and personal – and her death.

In transcribing Mansfield’s letters for the Edinburgh edition, I had already come to a deep-seated understanding of the amount of dissembling in her missives to Murry: outwardly loving, she remained inwardly tormented by the fact that there never was a couple less suited to each other than they were, as Leonard Woolf so astutely recognised. At no point in their relationship did Murry ever truly step up to the mark. But one man nearly always did – Orage. Sadly, Orage famously never kept letters. We only have one from Mansfield to him still in existence, plus the short draft of one more. Nevertheless, my suspicions were confirmed when I made contact with Orage scholar John Wood, who had written extensive notes on the subject but never published them, and who so generously allowed me to make use of his research for this biography. 

What we uncovered together was a deep-seated relationship, both sexual and intellectual, which supported Mansfield throughout her adult life, and which left regrets on both sides – especially the realisation that because of their personal circumstances, neither of them were able to fully explore that relationship. But if any proof were needed of Orage’s significance for Mansfield, they need only look to the last year of her life, and especially those precious few weeks spent together at Gurdjieff’s "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" in Fontainebleau-Avon. This biography traces that relationship, from its earliest beginnings, through frustrations and outward aloofness, to various rapprochements and covert liaisons, finally wending its complicated and thwarted route to its ultimate conclusion, in a way that has never been revealed before. In uncovering the true extent of Orage’s influence on Mansfield, and not just in 1910–11 as was previously thought, it will be impossible for future biographers to ignore what was possibly the most significant relationship of her entire life. 

You can read more about Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography. 

From Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life
The year 1919 marked the beginning of the last four years of Mansfield’s life (though she didn’t know it) – the most successful in terms of her professional career, the most harrowing in terms of her health and the most complex in terms of her relationship with Murry. The sheer number of letters sent attests to the long periods the couple were to spend apart during these last tumultuous years, as the two things Mansfield longed for more than anything (apart from good health) – a stable home life and her man by her side – drifted continually out of reach. Indeed, they were the things she most envied about her literary friend and rival, Virginia. In a letter to Virginia in April 1919 she had written, "A husband, a home, a great many books & a passion for writing – are very nice things to possess all at once." But later that year she would write to Murry, "That's one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together," and ten days later, 2How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call." Just two months later, remembering her utter distress a few weeks previously, she wrote again to Murry: "I used to feel like Virginia but she had Leonard. I had no-one." And it is just this sense of isolation – a lone warrior battling ill-health – together with a complicated, frequently disappointing marriage, that are the overriding features of the remainder of this biography.

Tara Singh, "✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗"

Picture by The Mollusc Dimension @squidhorsecomics

Tara Singh (they/them) is a queer, neurodivergent poet and occasional facilitator, born in Nairobi and raised in Nottingham. Their writing explores the Indian diasporic experience, queerness, gender identity, intergenerational trauma, mental illness, and disability.

About ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗, by Tara Singh

My debut pamphlet, ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗ (Five Leaves, 2025), emerged from several years of engagement with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, a psychotherapeutic model that conceptualises the self as composed of multiple "parts." Working through trauma within this framework, I began to visualise my internal system through emojis, each representing a particular survival response:

🦔 = fawn

🌋 = fight

🎭 = flight

❄️ = freeze

🌝 = befriend

These symbols became a creative shorthand for understanding emotional states and behavioural patterns. I often find it difficult to answer the everyday question, "How are you?"—but I can describe, in detail, how each of these parts feels and interacts.

Much of this exploration took place in collaboration with my therapist, through shared Google Docs in which the different parts of me "spoke" and received responses. These dialogues became both therapeutic and creative, allowing a multiplicity of voices to coexist on the page.

When I began composing ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗, I realised that each section of the pamphlet was being authored by a different part. The chapters correspond directly to the IFS framework:

🦔 = fawn ⚘

🌋 = fight ✹

🎭 = flight ∞

❄️ = freeze ⊗

🌝 = befriend 〇

In this sense, the pamphlet can be read as a polyphonic work—one written collaboratively by all five internal voices. The cover, perhaps, should credit the full IFS team: 🦔🌋🎭❄️🌝.

Below, you can read a couple of poems from ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗. You can read more about the collection on the publisher's website here. 

From ✹Fr⚘gm∞nts⊗

part of that world 

look at this house
it is not neat to end up with a girl who
doesn't seem to have a collection
of anything to make complete

there is no trove or treasure
no wonders or cavern
looking around you'd think
no child lives here at all

I'm the first there are no others
my scales are emerald satin
my hair is lush fire-red
I made a wish because I thought

I wanted to be where the people are
one day the girl decides
to take me to that place
what's it called? the bathroom

I'm ready to dance & swim but
she perches me on the edge of ugly coral
I want to ask Matey all my questions
he's gruff & unfriendly

I watch the bath being filled with
what do you call them? bubbles
they're flat
I wait for an invitation to play

the father comes in the girl seems
to forget I'm there I try to shut my eyes
then I remember my eyelids are plastic
the father leaves the girl seems to

forget what happened
she gets into her nightie
I try to say something but
I remember I'm not real

(taken from "freeze" chapter❄️⊗)
 

The Summer Holiday I Decide to Fight

His elbows have jigsaw bends so
he can punch in a weak plastic way
a boy in Derby sold him to me for £1.99

Brother's vest, clammy eggs in tigger cup
gulp don't throw up burpee 1 2 3
Papa's pullup bar until dizzy

The Undertaker punches stones
I punch dried kala chana, my notebook
holds predictions good guys & bad

I make boy cousins fight, I always win
Baldish is the first to say fists clenched
"boys & girls shouldn't play this way"

neck flushed he points at my chest
"you need to get a bra" I lob the Undertaker
over the fence into bushes next door

My new notebook measures me
every day how many calories I take in
& how much I burn away

(taken from "fight" chapter 🌋✹)