Hannah Stevens, "On the Bodies of Strangers"

Congratulations to UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate Hannah Stevens, whose new short story collection, On the Bodies of Strangers, has just been published!

 

Hannah Stevens is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. In Their Absence, her debut collection of stories was published by the Stretto imprint of Roman Books and was translated into Bulgarian by Ana Pipeva for Altera Press.

Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies including The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories and Unthology 10: Fight or Flight. She is widely published in literary journals and magazines globally including Archer Magazine (Australia), Loose Lips (Canada), Necessary Fiction (USA), Litro Magazine, Idle Ink, Losslit, Fictive Dream and TSS Publishing (all UK).

She is currently working on her third collection of stories inspired by her time living and working in Taiwan. She has undertaken writing residencies in Yangon, Myanmar, The Literature and Translation House in Sofia, Bulgaria and the Taiwan Literature Base, Taipei.

Hannah is also an editor and creative events producer and has worked around the world on projects using writing and storytelling as tools for positive social change, partnering with the BBC, the British Embassy, Greenpeace and many others. Her website is here. 

About On the Bodies of Strangers, by Hannah Stevens

Shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize 2022. A collection of short stories linked by the theme of tattoos.

Our lives, our experiences and the people we encounter leave behind indelible marks. On the Bodies of Strangers explores marked lives and marked flesh. The stories in this collection are linked by a single thread: the tattoos of their protagonists, traces of experiences and meaning etched onto their skin.  

 

These are stories about the chaos of ordinary lives, about people who are flawed, complicated, but always deeply human. From domestic abuse to unexpected friendship, mixing horror and hope, intimacies and lies, On the Bodies of Strangers explores the many ways we mark each other and ourselves as we deal with the complexities of human behaviour.  

You can read more about On the Bodies of Strangers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.  

From On the Bodies of Strangers

Extract from Stick and Poke

The sun is higher now and the air is hazy with dust. The factory is in full sun, and so they’ve had to move for some shade. They sit beneath a tree across the wasteland close by.

Angel opens her bag and pulls out an old towel. She lays it carefully onto the floor, smoothing out the rucks as best she can on the uneven ground. Alma watches, nods her head in approval.

"It’s getting real now," she says. Angel doesn’t speak, takes out a plastic pouch filled with a handful of sewing needles. Next she brings out a pencil, a spool of thread, and then a tiny pot of blank ink. 

"This is everything," says Angel, sitting up and straightening her back. 

"So, how does it work, then?" Alma asks. She shifts slightly, trying to get comfortable on the hard ground. 

"Well," says Angel. "You dip the needle into ink and then poke it into the skin. Like, over and over again."

 

"Yeah, even I got that," says Alma. "So the tattoo is made out of dots, not lines?"

"Yes," says Angel. "I’ll be poking dots, not drawing lines, and I’ll have to go over it a few times. It’s going to hurt." She stops talking and looks at Alma.

"It’s fine," says Alma. "I can handle it." She sniffs, avoids looking directly back at Angel. 

"What design do you want?" Angel asks. 

Alma doesn’t want to say, somehow. "I thought you were supposed to be the artist," she shrugs.

"I wouldn’t say that," says Angel. "Anyway, you should choose. It’s your body." 

A woman with two kids appears on the canal towpath. She is carrying shopping bags in each hand. They look heavy, and her shoulders sag. Alma can see the woman’s face is red, set hard against the distance she’s got to walk home. The two boys trail behind her, struggling in the lunchtime heat. Alma wonders who they are, who they’ll become, if they’d disappear eventually too. Just like her dad. 

"Maybe a moon," says Alma finally. She remembers that time when her dad was home. Just for a short while. How he showed her the moon from her bedroom window, said that whenever she saw it, she should think of him, how he loved her. It was the only time she’d heard him say that he loved anyone. She remembers the moon’s white glow, the curl of it against the dark, empty sky.

June Wentland, "Factory of Light"

June Wentland would like to be able to say that she has a degree in Cosmology from Samarkand University and now divides her time between Milan and Vienna as a doyen of both dance and fashion but this would not be true. Married with a child by the time she was twenty, she’s an ordinary woman from Hull and now (via Manchester and Bristol) lives in Wiltshire. Her novel, Foolish Heroines (Valley Press), was published in 2021. June has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and her poems have featured widely in literary journals and magazines. Factory of Light (Fox and Star Books) is a limited edition poetry chapbook and her first collection of any kind.

About Factory of Light, by June Wentland
When I was recently asked, in a Poetry Society Stanza group meeting, what I would look for if I ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of judging a high-profile poetry competition, I said I would be hoping for a poem that created a  world which insinuated itself into my literary landscape. Poems which approached the unsayable or were of such clarity that they landed in the very heart of a feeling. A big and intimidating ask! 

I hope that the poems in Factory of Light go a tiny way towards part-achieving some of these aspirations, whether it’s by inviting the reader into a Daphne Du Maurier-loving garden or sharing a Eureka moment in an electric lighting factory when a flat piece of cardboard is conjured, at the flick of a wrist, into an object with volume. The chapbook has been put together with the belief that it’s wonderful to sometimes look beyond the scaffold of our tired perceptions and use words to rediscover the miraculous in everyday things.

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

From Factory of Light 

Reading Rebecca

Last night my garden dreamt of Manderley. 
I only have myself to blame – 
wandering below the green domes 
of Du Maurier’s prose.

No one told me how impressionable 
foliage is to literature in April – 
its cuticles absorbing words 
with frail spring sun.

The garden listens, sleeps and grows, 
advancing gothic-stemmed through dusk. 
Slugs creep through clumps of sub-plots, 
snails through sage, thyme and tortured love.

The neighbour’s gardens are more formal,
but if they were better-read
they too could dream of Manderley – 
seeding ideas outside the neat edges

of their flower beds. The walls of this house
are a breakwater for surging blooms – 
tides of hyacinths and hydrangeas, 
sagas of azalea and chard. 

Here, you can listen – not to the sea – 
but to the swish of couch grass 
where a woman might falter in a flimsy boat 
and perish on the waves of greenery.


Summer in the factory of light 

          The former Cascade Lighting factory, Radcliffe, Manchester

To the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes, 
we worked in teams and over the sunny weeks, 
grew close. Fingers filled with washers and threaded-rods, 
we disclosed intimacies – finnicky as circuit wiring – 
the positives and negatives of our lives. 
The other girls were all sixteen 
I was sage-like in my twentieth year 
and as we ate our Friday fish and chips 
I gave them all advice. 

In the packing bay I had my own epiphany. 
Never before had I considered 
the aspirations of cardboard. 
How flatness could flick to volume – pre-
configurations opening in a man’s quick hands – 
futures seeded in papery DNA. 
Panels like corrugated petals, blooming
or geometric creatures unfolding from a pupal state.
Their flaps fledged only for closing – never flying – 
their limits taped in place. 

All through those warm, slow-moving weeks
I thought of boxes. 
Their inclinations and their secret needs. 
I was just nineteen. 
I was a mum, a mortgage-holder, student and a wife – 
I was a sorcerer of cardboard. 
I was an oracle on love and life.

Aidan Trulove, "How to End Your Story"

Aidan Trulove is a writer from Austin, Texas, who specialises in experimental fiction, mostly fantasy and horror. She mainly writes for a Young Adult (YA) audience, though also enjoys horrifying her professors with her encyclopaedic knowledge of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film she has incorporated into all of her academic work (without penalisation). She has been published by the Agave Review and the Skyline Literary Magazine, and currently works as a bookseller and story competition judge. 

Below, Aidan has written a letter addressed to future MA Creative Writing hopefuls, discussing her time writing her dissertation, The Unchosen One. 

How to End Your Story

To My Fellow Creative Writers,

When our dear lecturer and head of program, Jonathan Taylor, asked me to write about my process in crafting my dissertation, I was a bit surprised. Not because of anything about Jonathan, but due what he now knows about my own personal style. Even after earning my MA, I’m really not the formal academic-type. Here again, I probably won’t reference much of the theory that I’ve learned, or the articles (the many, many articles) I’ve read on the practice of writing. Instead, I’m going to tell you in the most unabashed way I can what it felt like to write my dissertation: The Unchosen One.  

Probably not the most dramatic title I could have chosen, but too late now. 

I came into this program having a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to finish my book, the first book in my Young Adult fiction series, which up until recently I’ve been calling The Unchosen One. (I’m changing this title because, now that I work in bookselling, I’ve realized there’s a Middle Grade book by the exact same name). I’ve been working on this project since the start of the COVID pandemic, when I had nothing else going on. The story of Gwen, my protagonist, and her misadventures in the magical world of Iaxos, have been my constant companion through two degrees, my entire relationship with my now-fianceé, and a series of moves from Texas to California, California to Texas, and Texas all the way to England. 

Still, even as I crept closer to the end of Gwen’s story, I found myself unable to part with it. I was terrified to let the story end - to face the beckoning crescendo at the culmination of the piece, one I didn’t feel skilled enough to write. I knew where I wanted Gwen’s story to go, but I didn’t know how to get there. Hence, deciding to get my MA. 

The single most important thing I learned during my time at Leicester is this: all stories have to end. They can have a concrete ending, an open-ending, an ending that falls somewhere in-between, but there comes a time where the words on the page must simply stop. Whether it’s a five-line poem or a twelve-thousand word dissertation, it’s not healthy to keep a story going indefinitely, for you or your writing. Especially since I plan on writing more books, I was encouraged in my dissertation to take this plunge, and to find out what an ending looked like, for me and for Gwen. 

At first, it felt like I was flying blind, because the research I wanted about the theory behind YA books just doesn’t exist yet, given that it’s a relatively new genre. This led me to switch to a more practical approach: reading YA books, mainly ones that were the first in their series, to look at how they ended and think about why. Given the timespan for the MA, I mainly focused on series I already loved: Suzanne Collins’ Hungergames, Tracey Deonn’s Legendborn, and Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha. I looked at these series, observing a) how the protagonists changed from the start to the end of the first book, b) what questions the end of the stories did/didn’t answer, and c) the overall effect of the ending on me as a reader. 

Between these factors, I noticed something: none of these stories came to a polished end. As they approached their final pages, they opened the worlds of their protagonists even wider, while also, as Harry Whitehead would put it, "chasing their characters up a tree and continuing to throw rocks at them." I also realized, it isn’t enough to scare your readers into caring about your main character, by simply leaving them dangling over a cliff. Most of the authors I read took things a step further, by using the very final moments of the book to take something away that their protagonists could never get back, and then, after backing them into a corner, finally allowing these figures to reach their true potential. 

To end, here is a small excerpt from one of the final chapters of my book. I hope you enjoy, and if you happen to be a fellow YA/fantasy/horror writer, don’t hesitate to ask Jonathan for my contact information. Writing is a team sport, and I couldn’t have done any of this without the advice of my lecturers, and the support of my peers. 

From The Unchosen One

Once when I was around fifteen, my family left me alone at the house for a few days. I was given free reign of the kitchen, with instructions to throw out any food in the fridge that I didn’t eat before it went bad. I forgot, and on the morning they came home, we opened the fridge to find a very brown, very sour steak that had sat too long and gotten exposed to air. My mom nearly threw up on the spot, and I was tasked with throwing out the old meat, along with cleaning out and sanitizing the entire fridge. That was the smell that reached me as I curled my shield into my body, only to feel something new, and wet, soaking the edge of my clothing ...

Good luck with your own writing! Yours truly,

Aidan Trulove

"Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process," ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

About Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary: Reflection, Influence, Process, ed. Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Almost all Creative Writing courses at University ask students to write reflectively as well as creatively: to submit commentaries alongside their creative work. This groundbreaking guide shows how to do this well - indeed, how commentaries might be works of art in themselves. 

In this unique collection of essays, published writers offer an intimate view of how their work has been informed, shaped and transformed by their literary, political, philosophical or personal influences. Providing models of the critical commentaries that all students of creative writing must write, each essay from contemporary authors of fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, scripts and digital writing demonstrates how what writers write is determined by what they have read, and what they read is then determined by what they are writing. As writers reflect on their process of moving from sources of inspiration to a finished and original piece of writing, they reveal their anxieties, passions, discoveries and motivations, offering fascinating insights into the imagination's journey. Introductory chapters explore why writers reflect on their own work, and place this practice in wider contexts, offering theoretical frameworks for understanding process, influence, and inspiration.

As illuminating for aspiring writers as it is for students reflecting on their research and process as part of writing courses, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary will change the way writers talk about and engage with other texts.

You can read more about Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the list of contents, about the editors, and a short sample from the introduction of the book.  

Contents of Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

Chapters include:

Part One: Introductory
1. Preface
2. On Reflection in Creative Writing
3. On Influence in Creative Writing

Part Two: Sample Critical Commentaries

4. The Personal Is Always Political, by Karen Stevens
5. The Art of Persuasion, by Jo Nadin
6. On the Genealogy of Memoirs, by Jonathan Taylor
7. "The Community of Sorrow," by David Swann
8. The End is Never Where You Think, by Dan Powell
9. The Age of Influence in the Age of Authenticity, by Jemma Kennedy
10. Go Outside, by Shaindel Beers, Blue Mountain Community College
11. Jesus, Fairy Tales and Flash Fiction, by Kit de Waal
12. Alternate Truths and Fake News, by Anietie Isong
13. Memoir and Main Character Syndrome, by Jenn Ashworth
14. Experimental Poetic Autography, by Lila Matsumoto
15. Digital Narratives, Technology and the Domestic Gothic, by Kate Pullinger

Part Three: Postscripts

16. Further Reading: Selected Bibliography

About the editors

Karen Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, where she specialises in teaching fiction. She is an author and editor, and has edited two critical and creative anthologies: Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey (2014) and High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories (2018). Her debut collection of short stories Brilliant Blue (2025) was published with Barbican Press. She is on Twitter @KarenStevens01.

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Leicester University, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His most recent books are A Physical Education (Goldsmiths, 2024) and Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). His website is here.  

From Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary

From the Preface, by Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor

Welcome to the mirror-world: the world of Creative Writing in higher education, where the assumption is that learning is, in part, reflective. You learn to write – or learn to write better – by reflecting on your own work and the work of others. The mirror-world reflects both yourself and your (literary) surroundings, and you learn by studying those reflections, by staring into the mirror. In that sense, a reflective practitioner is a split self: you are both a writer and someone who stands outside yourself, reflecting on your own practice, reading and critically evaluating your work as if you were someone else. You are both a writer and a writer who writes about their own writing. 

To put this more simply: almost all Creative Writing courses in formal education – whether at undergraduate, postgraduate or PhD level – include some kind of reflective element, and this manifests itself most obviously in the form of a written text which accompanies your creative work. That is, when you are asked to submit a piece of Creative Writing as part of your course, it is (as you may already know) customary for that work to be accompanied by some kind of "supplementary discourse" – a "reflective commentary" or "critical commentary" or "critical exegesis." (The names vary from institution to institution, but for the purposes of this book we’ll stick with "critical commentary," for the most part). As Maria Taylor suggests, the "critical commentary" allows the writer to see their "'other' self … the twin … in the mirror …. Reflective writing allows for engaging with that mysterious mirror-image figure, and gives the writer fresh insights into the practice of their own writing …. Students must be encouraged to take that brave first step through the looking glass into themselves in order to understand their motives and processes as writers" (The Place and the Writer, 2021: 130-1).

This book aims to help you to take that "step through the looking glass." It is about the process of reflection generally, and its written incarnation, the "critical commentary," more specifically ... 

Book Review Competition 2026: The Results

 

Our review blog, Everybody's Reviewing, recently passed one and a half million readers. To celebrate this milestone, the Centre for New Writing in conjunction with Everybody's Reviewing ran a Book Review Competition. Current undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Leicester were invited to write short reviews of any book they've recently enjoyed. You can read more about the competition here.

The judging is now complete, and below you can see the results. The judges have awarded one first prize, which is a £50 voucher, one second prize, which is a £25 voucher, and no fewer than four "honorable mentions." All of these excellent reviews will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next couple of weeks. 

Congratulations to everyone who entered - it was a very strong field!

First Prize 

Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, review of Wilder Girls, by Rory Power

Second Prize

Charlie Black, review of Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell

Honorable Mentions

Aamani Bommareddy, review of Vicky Angel, by Jacqueline Wilson

Rim Asma Khalifa, review of And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

Olivia Peachey, review of A Short Stay in Hell, by Steven L. Peck

Anupriya Sisodia, review of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Martin Goodman, "Swimming for England"

Born in Leicester, raised in Loughborough, and then let loose on the wider world, Martin Goodman settled down to become a writer at the age of twelve. It’s the one plan that stuck. Books evolve in his head while others come out in the world. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, sixteen titles take on spiritual journeys, reckonings with ancestral heritage, great lives, eco dramas, and gay themes. Some books win prizes, others win a few readers, and he figures all were worth the years that went into them. See his website here for more. 

About Swimming for England, by Martin Goodman
As a Leicester-based site you’ll probably get my brief pitch: Joe Orton on the Beach.

Faisal arrived in England in a boat of refugees from Calais. This time he’s swimming the Channel.

An English couple wait on the beach. They save lost boys – turning them into real men. Faisal will be their triumph, their first cross-Channel swimmer.

They plan to celebrate. Then out of nowhere Cameron appears. He’s Scottish but black, in smart clothes but with dirty hands. 

Is this another young man they can save? Or has he been digging around in their dark secrets? Now do they have to save themselves?

A chilling examination of English identity, toxic charity, and the violence that can erupt when we don’t get what we want.

You can read more about Swimming for England on the publisher's website here. Below, you can short a short extract from the novel. 

From Swimming for England

That bit about the sea swallowing him up, surely he didn’t mean… ?

Or is this him coming back?

It’s a young man for sure—but he’s not wearing white. He’s not wearing anything; well just a band of the briefest black swimming trunks. Black hair, brown skin, his feet stepping securely on pebbles like they were cushions of moss, walking with such poise, and as he steps free of the mist the daylight catches the wet sheen on him.

Eileen opens wide her arms. "Faisal!" she says.

"Hello Mum."

Faisal kisses Eileen on the cheeks. His lips are cold and he smells of the sea. Her waterproofs crinkle as she wraps her arms about his waist.

"You did it!" It’s hard to speak, her head pressed against the flesh of his chest, his heart beating fast, faster than hers, but she manages it. "Our boy’s a cross-Channel swimmer!"

He presses his hands on her shoulders and levers himself away. It’s not unkind. It’s just that Brian has stepped so close that Eileen’s squeezed off to the side.

"Dad." Faisal wraps his arms around Brian and they do a bear hug. 

Brian laughs that the boy is so wet and his oilies are working. "Go on," he says. "Shake yourself. Like a puppy. I said you would."

Faisal shakes himself. His black hair flicks wide from the wetness of his scalp and droplets rain in a silver shower all around him. Brian and Eileen laugh so Faisal shakes himself again.

There’s a roar. It comes from inside the mist, from the sea, a male bellow that swells like it was going somewhere, an anger set to explode, and then it just stops. They listen for more, and hear just the crash of a wave, and then another.

"What was that?" Faisal asks.

"That’ll be Cameron."

"He’s a young man," Eileen adds. "He’s got a good voice but he can’t swim. I think he’s thrown himself into the sea."