Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, "Cold Toast"

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is a Bristol-based writer whose debut collection of flash fiction Cold Toast has recently been published by Dahlia Books. Her work has been published in various anthologies and literary magazines, including the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual, Pithead Chapel, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion Magazine, and elsewhere. She has won the Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Forge's Flash Nonfiction competition, Lucent Dreaming’s flash contest, and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work was selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2025. She is currently working on a novella-in-flash, supported by an Arts Council England DYCP Award. Her author website is here. 

About Cold Toast, by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris
Rooted in 70s and 80s Britain, this evocative flash fiction collection captures the moments when girls and women first glimpsed their own power – or lack of it.

Set against a backdrop of smoky kitchens, playground politics, and flickering TV sets, these stories trace the quiet rebellions and uneasy compromises of lives shaped by expectation and constraint. Two women discuss an unfaithful husband at the school gates. A father trades his daughter’s first kiss for a fishing trip. A girl becomes convinced the silent calls to her home are from the Yorkshire Ripper.

By turns tender, raw, and defiant, this collection lays bare the tension between freedom and conformity, love and survival, and what it meant to come of age in a world that wasn’t always ready for you.

You can read more about Cold Toast on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample flash fiction from the collection. 

From Cold Toast
Note: this flash fiction, ‘Double Lives,’ appears in Cold Toast and was the winner of Manchester Writing School and Manchester School of Theatre’s ‘QuietManDave Prize’ in 2022, and also appears in Fuel: An anthology of prize-winning flash fictions to raise funds for fuel poverty, edited by Tania Hershman. It is written in the form of a breathless sentence.

Double Lives

I see Gwen at the school gates and she does this thing where she’s looking but not seeing and I’m not in the mood so I wave my hands in her face and she says sorry, but she’s still got this unseeing expression and I ask is everything ok? and she says yeah, if finding out your husband’s living with another woman in the arse end of Wales is ok, and I say what, you mean your husband Rhys? and she nods, and says yes, my husband Rhys, and it’s a crazy way for us to be carrying on because she only has one husband, but I’m not getting it, so I say Rhys Rhys? and she says, Rhys Rhys, and I feel a kind of vertigo because it was only last March when I noticed how he’d started hanging back after dropping the kids off, how easy it was to talk to him about all the stuff no one else ever wants to talk about, like how we all create our own prisons and how we’ll bring our kids up to know there are more choices out there, how I was the only mother he spoke to, the only mother whose jokes he laughed at, and how good it felt to crack a crooked smile in the face Gwen always described as being like a slapped backside―and I think they’ve been together since they were fifteen, to be honest, I had thought a lot about that, about getting to your forties and only sleeping with one other person and if Rhys had ever thought about sleeping with other women before―before that first crazy time―and Gwen says she’s going to get a test from the pharmacy because how many other women has he been sleeping with, and I’m like, you think there could have been more? and she shrugs, and I’m getting this weird double vision thing where the canopies on the horse chestnuts in front of us aren’t lined up with the trunks and my left arm starts going numb, and I say, I’m not feeling too good and she says, Rhys told me you got migraines, and says, bye then, so I say, bye then, and watch her go; double-Gwen surrounded by an aura of fucked electrical impulses only I can see.

Ruth Bidgood, "Chosen Poems," with a memoir by Merryn Williams

By Merryn Williams 

I first met Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) when I was a struggling new poet and she was one of the most eminent Welsh poets in English. We shared a love of the "green desert" of mid-Wales – ruined cottages, ever-changing weather, high hills you could ascend into a "cold kingdom of black bog and rock." She had retreated to the tiny village of Abergwesyn, where she lived quietly, after several silent years in the Home Counties and a painful divorce.  

Her language was always plain and clear, what Wordsworth called "the real language of men." Here is a short poem which expresses piercing sorrow through the simplest images:

Elegy for Sarah

Bitter apples load the tree

by a girl’s grave

in a tangle of summer weeds.

Small wet apples glow

through summer rain.

"My days are past"

she cries from her stone,

"my purposes are broken off" –

apple bough broken,

fallen in dripping weeds.

"even the thoughts of my heart."

My thoughts, my purposes, my days

broken among weeds,

and summer rain falling

on wet stone, bitter apples.

That’s exactly how it feels, standing near a crumbling Welsh church in the rain thinking of the lives that have ended. She was interested in exploring, not so much the hilly country itself, as landscapes of the mind:

Acquaintance

It was from a border county of my life

you crossed into another country, 

having never settled. Smoke rose one dawn

from the overnight house for which

your thrown stone transitorily defined

a patch of my waste land; but soon

the hut was derelict. Acquaintance ending

seems not to warrant uneasier weather

than a fraction of wind-change brings;

yet over my moors the sky sags now,

black with irrational certainty

of departures. From your hasty thatch

rushes loosen, blow east. The heartland may be next

to know depopulation.

A relationship which never became a close friendship is described through images of the sparsely populated land around Abergwesyn. And next thing you know, her family is about to break up.

 Ruth immersed herself in local history and wrote wonderful poems about obscure and vanished people - servants, small farmers, a man who emigrates to Australia and a man who doesn’t ("Emu’s Egg"). She wrote too about the great subjects of darkness and light ("Driving through 95% Eclipse"), about the threats to, and from nature ("Slate Quarry, Penceulan"), and restrainedly about her deep love for a man who died ("Voyage"). She never talked much about herself, so after her death and with the permission of her children, I explored her previous life as a girl in Port Talbot (where Richard Burton was a schoolmate), a Wren in wartime and a 1950s housewife. The poetry came late, coinciding with her move back to Wales, and although she went on writing well into her nineties the great poems belong to the Abergwesyn years. It turned out that this little patch of earth yielded an inexhaustible subject, and I find myself re-reading her poems constantly and with growing admiration.

You can read more about Chosen Poems by Ruth Bidgood, with a memoir by Merryn Williams, here. 

Book Review Competition 2025: The Results

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing ran a book review competition. The competition was open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. You can read more about it here. 

The standard of entries was very high indeed - every entry we received was professional, well-written and eminently publishable. Results of the competition are below. First prize is £100 in gift vouchers. There are also two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers, plus three "Honourable Mentions." All winning entries will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next week or so. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Results

1st Prize: Lee Wright, for his review of On Agoraphobia, by Graham Caveney

Runner-Up: Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, for her review of The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

Runner-Up: Iain Minney, for his review of The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

Honourable Mention: Wiktoria Borkowska, for her review of I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Honourable Mention: Kathy Hoyle, for her review of Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers

Honourable Mention: Kimaya Patil, for her review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

D. A. Prince, "Continuous Present"

  

Since 2008, D. A. Prince has published three collections with HappenStance Press. The second, Common Ground, won the East Midlands Book Award in 2015. The third, The Bigger Picture (2022), includes ‘The Window,’ Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes anthology for 2020. Her poems have also made less conventional appearances: as bookmarks, on posters on the Longbenton Metro station in Newcastle, and even handwritten, on biscuit wrappers as part of the Wrapper Rhymes installation at StAnza in 2020. Prince reviews contemporary poetry for London Grip, The Friday Poem and Orbis among other literary magazines. 

Prince's new pamphlet, Continuous Present, is published by New Walk Editions, which is co-edited by Nick Everett, Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

About Continuous Present, by D. A. Prince
Is there such a thing as an ‘average moment’? If so, what might it contain? The varied immediacy of the natural world, perhaps, richly green; a conversation on a suburban bus or at the hairdresser; or the monotony of the M1 in heavy traffic, where the relentless pressure from heavy lorries and their mission statements – Driven by Perfection, Optimal Solutions, Your Tomorrow Delivered Today – tower over you and your small car. While the continuity of time brings the past close to the present, just out of sight there are other worlds: the what-ifs, parallel lives and choices you might have made. These poems explore the textures of routine experience but also glimpse alternative dimensions within and beyond our daily lives.

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

From Continuous Present

I’d Got My Notebook Out

but the man by the window untangling his hearing aids
explains how the batteries stick — no, not rechargeable —
and, when the bus bounces, that the drain covers
need resetting, how it’s easier with tarmac
unlike the Chinese granite — this City Council,
that Mayor they’ve got — and he and his brother
(both into archaeology) complained —
but do they listen? Then he’s back to the cellar,
his aunt’s house, demolished now —
but you know that bar, that Belgian one —
and when the gas was put in
they found a hole, could see three arches
with those Roman bricks, and a wall,
but were the Council interested? And now
it’s all gone, but what’s beneath, buried:
who knows? Gets off at the museum
(two developers gone bust, the deadlined posters
eaten by the rain) and pavement, asphalt, tarmac
aren’t the solid footings they were yesterday.

Cézanne at Tate Modern

Too many apples says my friend, dismissing
Cézanne and his stubborn brush working
the canvas over and over, trying
to uncover truth or whatever
lies under the skin. His apple-flesh grows solid
but never solid enough for him:
he’s weighing their presence, finding that they lack
what his brush won’t give. Perhaps it’s the light
falling too thin on them, too forgiving
of failure. Perhaps he can’t forgive himself,
his hand closing too tight. Perhaps
one more time will get it right, then one more time.
He can’t have too many apples. None
is perfect but it’s no longer apples that matter,
only how in the alchemy of oil and canvas
and his brush they become apples.
Obstinate, indestructible, wrote Rilke
after Cézanne’s death. Now they hang here
framed and untouchable, still challenging
the ticketed crowd nodding past,
familiar with the surface blur of apples
— Too many apples — red, green, why so many? —
not seeing each apple testing itself
against the previously unpaintable air,
the brush coming to terms with the press of paint
against weave and hand and eye.
We can’t have too many apples.

Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees"

 

Meg Pokrass is the author of The First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories (Dzanc Books, 2024) and eight previous collections of flash fiction and two novellas in flash. She is a two-time winner of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award. Her work has been published in three Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form, including Flash Fiction America, New Micro, and Flash Fiction International. It has also been included in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2025; Wigleaf Top 50; and hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Rattle, SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, New England Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Washington Square Review, and Passages North. Meg is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review, festival curator and co-founder of Flash Fiction Festival UK, and founding / managing editor of the Best Microfiction anthology series. She lives in Inverness, Scotland, where she serves as chief judge for the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Award.

About Old Girls and Palm Trees, by Meg Pokrass, illustrated by Cooper Renner
Old Girls and Palm Trees is an illustrated collection about iconoclasts, perpetual dreamers, tightrope walkers, living room magicians, cat lovers, and female friendship. The "old girls" in these linked hybrid pieces are women of a certain age who, in an alternate reality, refuse to accept the stereotypes of aging. The collection is conjured from dreamscapes of what just may be true. The poems, prose poems and micros in this collection invite us into an alternate reality where joy and love for same sex friends become a magical force to be reckoned with.  

You can read more about Old Girls and Palm Trees on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read five sample pieces from the collection. 

From Old Girls and Palm Trees

Rosy 

 

Late August we adopt a cat. The house brightens up. We name her after the pinkish-red clouds hanging around like half-eaten cotton candy. Rosy is a kisser, jumping on my desk, sniffing my lips. Twirling around in the living room chasing her tail. 

"Did you know that a scattering of wavelengths and blue light in the sky could be so lovely?" she says as the sky turns even more rosy than the night before.

Plunking Away on the Sofa 

 

It trickles down from my scalp as if it doesn’t know where to go or how to stop going there. "Stop moping about your mop," the old girl says. She smiles at me as if I’m perfectly imperfect and sits with the rosy cat while I plunk away on my ukulele, singing "When the Saints Come Marching In" to an audience of whiskers. 

"All we need now is a New Orleans funeral," she laughs, her arms around the cat—the three of us floating away to the islands.

Grand Entrances

 

At the Japanese lantern festival, the old girl and I hip-bump in, psyched about whatever people think of us, two zaps of purple in the crazy shuffle, licking wasabi from our lips, ignoring our hair, unpedicured, unmanicured, candid with hard-earned frumpiness. "You are my badge of honor," she says, holding my fingers. "You are my lantern in the wind."

Collector of Days

 

Late August, the dampness eased. We watched a squirrel collect nuts and take them back to her nest. I told the old girl, It’s almost September, you’re still here. She smiled. Where else? At the pond in the woods, we cast our fingers into the water, felt the cold sting. At the end of each dripping day we swung on the porch, kissing the rims of our wine glasses.  

 

Lewis Buxton, "Mate Arias"

Lewis Buxton, photo by Rosie A Mills-Smith

Lewis Buxton won the Winchester Poetry Prize in 2020 and has a full-length collection out with Nine Arches Press. He regularly visits schools, delivering workshops and performances to young people, and his theatre shows tour extensively in the UK. He lives in Norfolk.

About Mate Arias, by Lewis Buxton
Mate Arias is Lewis Buxton’s love song to his friends, a soaring voice attempting to communicate in a masculine world often punctuated by silence or violence. Muscles are torn, crossword clues are pondered, and pints are lifted as the poet attempts to make sense of his friends and himself, and their often clumsy, physical dances around each other.

Under the glares of floodlights and movie screens, with a backdrop of superheroes and zombies, Buxton creates the settings for new versions of male friendships. A poignant and funny exploration of making and maintaining relationships as lives begin to move in different directions, Mate Arias is a unique celebration of the tenderness and love that can be communicated by men.

You can read more about Mate Arias on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

Working Out 

We lift until our arms are dead rabbits: 

he would prefer we were sat in awkward 

positions, dumbbells slung across our hips 

thrusting upwards, rather than find a word 

for what we are to each other: Mate? Friend? 

Buddy? Pal? Brother? I don’t even know. 

Now we are fit shadows trying to bend 

our bodies into shape. I wouldn’t go 

if you didn’t come with me, Alex says 

as we knacker ourselves on the treadmills, 

horses eating air, speaking through spittle. 

I often turn up alone but most days 

that feels thick and forlorn. It’s nice you’re here 

mate, friend, buddy, pal, brother, whatever.

Book Review Competition 2025: Call for Entries!

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing are running a book review competition. 

The competition is open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. First prize is £100 in Amazon gift vouchers. There will also be two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers. All entries will be considered for publication on the website. 

All you have to do is write a short book review (200-400 words) of a book you’ve read recently and enjoyed. The review should be positive overall. The book you choose doesn’t have to be new: it can be any work of fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry from any time, by any author. Please include a short (2-line) biography of yourself at the end of the review. 

Please send your entries (no more than one per student) to this email address: everybodysreviewing@gmail.com. You can also use the same email address for any queries you have about the competition. 

The deadline for submissions is 9am on Monday 23 June 2025.