Judith Allnatt, "The Poet's Wife"

Judith Allnatt writes novels, poetry and short stories. Her most recently published novel, The Poet’s Wife, was shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award. Her first novel, A Mile of River, was featured as a Radio 5 Live Book of the Month and shortlisted for the Portico Prize. Short stories have featured in the Bridport Prize Anthology, the Commonwealth Short Story Awards, the Edinburgh Flash Fiction Awards and on BBC Radio 4. Judith lectures widely and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her website is here. 

About The Poet's Wife, by Judith Allnatt
Inspired by the letters written by the poet John Clare from the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, The Poet’s Wife gives a voice to Patty Clare as she faces John’s deluded belief that he is married to Mary Joyce, his childhood sweetheart, whom Patty can never hope to rival. 

Patty loves John deeply, but he seems lost to her. Plagued by jealousy, she seeks strength in memories: their whirlwind courtship, the poems John wrote for her, their shared affinity for the land. But as John descends further into delusion, she struggles to conquer her own anger and hurt, and reconcile with the man she now barely knows.

You can read more about The Poet’s Wife here. You can read an interview with the author by Adèle Geras here. Below, you can read an extract from the novel. 

From The Poet’s Wife
After four years away, I found my husband sitting by the side of the road, picking gravel from his shoe and with his foot bloody from long walking. His clothes were crumpled from nights spent in the hedge or goodness knows where, and he had an old wide-awake hat on the back of his head like a gypsy.

"John," I said. "Are you coming home?"

When he heard his name he looked up at me, as if curious that I knew it, then held out his shoe to me as if to show me its parlous state: its sole loose and hanging from the upper. I bent and put it back upon his foot as gently as I could, for his stocking was brown with blood from many blisters. He watched my face with a look of puzzlement and when I stood and reached out my hand to help him up he refused it, levered himself up by his own efforts and began to walk away. His short figure and limping gait were so pitiful as he set off again along the empty road that my heart followed straight after him.

I turned back to Mr. Ward and Charles who were waiting in the cart, but they looked as nonplussed as I. Not wishing to lose him again, I followed down the road calling "John! Wait!" and when I reached him I caught his hands fast in mine. 

He pulled them away as if I had burned him saying "Are you drunk, woman? Leave me be!" and continued to shuffle along with his shoulders set as if he had been mortally offended.

Matthew James Jones, "Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures"

Matthew James Jones is a poet, novelist, storyteller and veteran who wrote the best-selling novel Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures. Today, Matt writes and teaches in Paris: Leadership at the École Militaire and Creative Writing at SciencesPo. His many published works interrogate themes of dehumanization, poetics, monsters, masculinity, cross-cultural exchange, and healing. He also co-hosts the by-donation Write Time workshop, and organizes fitness enthusiasts who use trees as barbells: the Log Club. 

About Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures, by Matthew James Jones
Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures tracks Jones, a drone operator stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2010. As he monitors Sahar, a teenager and suspected terrorist, Jones commits the ultimate crime: he cares. 

Jones’s supervisor is similarly stained, a fierce soldier who champions Afghan women. By day, Jones and the Major track Taliban down the cratered highways. By night, they wish their love had never hurt so many. 

Beneath the base, Jones befriends Noah who, despite his cruel fangs and horrifying strength, is the only gentle creature in the entire desert. As Jones contends with a brutal predator stalking soldiers, Noah’s bids for freedom grow desperate, and the fighting season renews with a fresh crop of Taliban. 

In Kandahar, there’s a monster in every window. And there’s also one in every mirror. As the war grinds him to ever-finer particles, Jones grapples with the toll—madness, craters, grief.

From Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures

Predator

I was so used to looking through them, but never at them. On the other side of a fence, the drone idled on the tarmac in front of a bunker. It stood as tall as I did. Shark-like, with two pectoral fins that extended from its sides like a traditional plane. Yet the stabilizing fins at the tail pointed down in an inverse "V." Grey. Grey with white patches: a camouflage of cloud. The most disconcerting thing was its eyelessness. Easy to imagine planes with cockpits and windows and WWII pilots mummified in looping scarves. Not these flying robots, piloted by science and logic. The drone seemed to have a face, but without eyes, it was blank, expressionless. Instead, it "saw" through hypersensitive nodes on the back of its neck, and chin. Drones have no agency; they obey the voices in their heads, clutching close their clusters of bombs: four in each armpit. This type of drone was the Predator, little brother of Reaper. I met its unblinking gaze for a moment. Truly it was a predator, as unfeeling as they wanted us to be. Its job was to hide in clouds or the glare of the sun. To lurk behind bunkers with a Taser. When Predator was a child he was never invited to picnics. His hands were full of missiles that he thought were flowers. He was a strange boy, too quiet. Always muttering to himself and wanting to be older so his bombs would drop. Always rubbing his node on the legs of teachers. No one wants to be your friend, Predator. The only thing you know how to do is assassinate people. You think, because you’re unmanned, you can cross borders and kill in other lands, and no one will think that is war. You’re on the wrong side of history. You could be so noble, flying into radioactive areas, dumping water on thirsty crops, detonating yourself in the eyes of sharknados. But you were seized early, by powerful men, and made a weapon, same as the rest of us.

Julian Stannard, "The University of Bliss"

Julian Stannard is the author of nine collections of poetry. His New and Selected Poems were published by Salt in 2025. In 2024 he was awarded the Lerici Shelley Prize for his contribution to Italian literature. Sagging Meniscus Press (USA) brought out his campus novel The University of Bliss at the end of 2024. He is a Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. For many years he taught at the University of Genoa. His website is here. 

About The University of Bliss, by Julian Stannard
The University of Bliss is campus novel. It’s set in 2035. Senior management - VC Gladys Nirvana, Pro Vice-Chancellor Imelda Wellbeloved and Dean of Discipline Professor Leech - bullies a beleaguered teaching staff. All seems hopeless until a triumvirate of lecturers – Harry Blink, Tristan Black and Humph Lacan – stages a fight back. Discoveries are made. There’s a very important aubergine. The stakes are high.

You can read more about The University of Bliss on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the novel by Kim Wiltshire on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two extracts from the novel. 

From The University of Bliss

1.

The Reverend Lady Bishop—Imelda Wellbeloved—ambled around the campus with a Shih Tzu. The dog had been flown over from the factory in Tibet at great expense. There was a range of Shih Tzus available but Imelda had gone for the luxury model. A top of the range Shih Tzu could glow in the dark—as could its excrement—which the dog generously spread around the campus far and wide in small, illuminated packages.

The Student Volunteer Scheme encouraged students to become Shih Tzu poop scoopers—something for the CV—and they were incentivized by a Zapp which allowed them to use a high-tech Poop Nav Ping-Pong Bat which had the magnetic force to suck the excrement from a considerable distance and at great speed. Having shot through the air the luminous crap hit the ping pong bat with a satisfying smack. The experience was heightened if a member of staff inadvertently stepped into the flight path.

2.

Harry didn’t want to live in South Town. That grim conurbation. University teachers could rent a modest property there. They needed a middling citizen score to obtain their residence permit. A lower score meant North Town or—God forbid—Shit Town. If his citizen score dipped he could be re-located at any moment. Disciplinary proceedings meant academics got sent to Shit Town for three-month tasters, on half pay and with limited access to toilet paper. In any case South Town was shitty enough. Sometimes the train stopped at Shit Town. The air full of faecal odours. Travellers rushed to close the windows. An automated voice announced:

‘This is Shit Town. Please don’t alight unless you live here. Please don’t alight unless you live here. This is Shit Town ...’

Harry looked at the miserable bastards getting off. Wasn’t that Terry Eagleton?

Rhian Elizabeth, "maybe i'll call gillian anderson"

Rhian Elizabeth is a trainee counsellor and a writer. Her debut novel, Six Pounds Eight Ounces, was published in 2014 by Seren Books and is currently being adapted for TV, and there are the poetry collections the last polar bear on earth, published in 2018 by Parthian Books, and girls etc, by Broken Sleep Books, which has been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2025. Her prose and poetry have been listed in various competitions and prizes and appeared in many magazines and anthologies worldwide, recently being longlisted for the Plaza Poetry Prize and winning Verve Press’ poetry competition, as well as being featured on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. She was named by the Welsh Agenda as one of Wales’ Rising Stars - one of 30 people working to make Wales better over the next 30 years. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and was previously Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Tranås, Sweden. maybe i’ll call gillian anderson is her latest collection of poetry, published by Broken Sleep Books.

About maybe i'll call gillian anderson, by Rhian Elizabeth
Rhian Elizabeth's maybe i'll call gillian anderson is a raw, darkly funny, and deeply affecting collection that navigates the liminal spaces of love, loss, and reinvention. With a voice that is both unguarded and sharply observant, Elizabeth crafts poems that move through heartbreak, motherhood, memory, and self-destruction with biting wit and aching tenderness. Whether tracing the ghosts of past selves, confronting absence, or yearning for connection, these poems refuse sentimentality, instead offering something braver-an intimacy that is as unsparing as it is humane.

You can read more about maybe i'll call gillian anderson on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From maybe i'll call gillian anderson

the winter the murders stopped 

i went to the christmas party dressed as a reindeer, 

           top floor apartment by the river, 

spilled my manhattan over her and her couch, cold collarbones, 

           cold leather, walked home 

through the glacial streets drenched in stars, coat slick 

           with sleet and regret, 

           i feel like a photograph yellowing.

           i miss hearing the creak of my daughter’s bedframe

in the middle of the night, miss being summoned 

           for glasses of water she could easily 

get herself, and now my house is filled 

           with spiders, since there is

no one here afraid of them,

           asking me to kill for them, anymore.

D. R. Hill, "Who Is Claude Cahun?"

D. R. Hill (David Rowland Hill) is a writer, actor and theatre director, who also founded the cultural consultancy, ArtReach. His new play, Who is Claude Cahun?, runs at London’s Southwark Playhouse from 18 June to 12 July 2025. In 2023 and 2024 there were two touring productions of his play, Draining the Swamp, about Oswald Mosley and the rise of fascism. Previous publications include Under Scan (co-written with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer), Voices of Culture (The Role of Culture in Promoting Refugee Inclusion) co-written as a commission from the European Union, and ArtReach – 25 Years of Cultural Development. His short stories "3250" and "House Clearance" have both been published by Bandit Fiction and "The Escort’s Story" by The Channel. His collection of short stories, House Clearance, published by Dixon and Galt, was shortlisted for the Eyelands International Book Awards in 2019. In 2021 he was shortlisted for a second time by Eyelands for his novel, From Now On. He has also had original plays performed by Theatre Station Blyth and Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham and for Cheltenham Literature Festival, he co-wrote Peace in Our Town with Barrie Keeffe. 

About Who is Claude Cahun?, by D. R. Hill

A true story of artist resistance.

Claude Cahun, queer artist from the 1930s, challenged gender norms in a surrealist, male-dominated Paris art scene. Born Lucy Schwob into a French, Jewish family, they and lifelong partner, Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), relocated to Jersey. When the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands in 1940, Cahun and Moore determined to use guerrilla art to subversively resist Nazi oppression. Their story, challenging fascism and evading the Gestapo, has remained hidden for too long. It is a testament to courage and self-acceptance of a search for identity.

"Neuter is the only gender that really suits me" - Claude Cahun.

With an inclusive cast of five actors, moving image and projection mapping, and surreal masks and movement, DRH Arts and Exchange Theatre realise the extraordinary story of Cahun and Moore at Southwark Playhouse Borough from 18 June to 12 July (eves 7.30 and Tuesday and Saturday matinees at 3pm). Find out more here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the play.    

From Who Is Claude Cahun? 

Extract from the play

Scene 11 

(Projected image of a Parisian apartment, Montmartre, autumn 1933. Cahun and Moore are constructing a sculpture with masculine and feminine elements. They delight in working together.)

Moore: She, he, or it? What do we call this?

Cahun: I call it "myself." 

Moore: So you are?

Cahun: It always depends where I am.

Moore: When you’re with me?

Cahun: Why can’t I change my mind?

Moore: You can. You are a gallery of people.

Cahun: And you are my curator. (Pause). Neuter is the only gender that really suits me. I love working with you. I can’t make art with the others. I feel despised by them. They don’t acknowledge my art.

Moore: When did you first know you were different?

Cahun: As far back as I can remember. When I saw little girls, they looked alien to me. My mother wanted to doll me up, just like them. I didn’t want to be like that. What did you want to be? When you were a child.

Moore: A boy. And then an artist, a designer.

Cahun: And now?

Moore:  A photographer of course. With my own gallery. Presenting the pictures I want to present. The pictures of you! 

Cahun: I want us to be successful artists together. You are the photographer and I am your model … unless you want to be the model.

Moore: I don’t want to be the model. I want to capture you, with every mask that you choose to wear. 

Cahun: You’ll be taking a lot of pictures!

Moore: I want to capture your essence…

Cahun: You will never capture it! You know that. I don’t know what it is.

Moore: I know, that’s why I love you.

Cahun: Is it? You do love me, don’t you?

Moore: Of course! (They embrace). Every day I meet you anew.

Kate Loveman, "The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary"

Congratulations to Prof Kate Loveman, whose book The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary has just been published!

Kate Loveman is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Leicester. She researches the literature and history of the seventeenth century, notably things to do with Samuel Pepys (who rarely met a thing he did not want to have to do with). She is the author of Reading Fictions 1660-1740 (2008) and Samuel Pepys and his Books (2015), and has edited Pepys’s diary for Everyman (2018).

About The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary, by Kate Loveman
During the 1660s, Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary, full of intimate details and political scandal. First published two hundred years ago, it is now the most famous diary in the English language. The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary explores why Pepys’s diary was written, how this secret diary came to be published, and the many remarkable roles it has played in British culture since then. Pepys’s journal has prompted creative responses ranging from Victorian fanfiction to World War II propaganda and COVID parodies. For two centuries, it has also encouraged debates about what counts as ‘history’ and about whose stories are worth telling.

You can read more about The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
Pepys’s journal vividly describes momentous events, such as the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London, alongside small moments – quarrels with his wife or jokes with servants. Since it was first published in 1825, it has variously been called an ‘incomparable masterpiece,’ ‘an historical and literary work of an outstanding character,’ ‘trifling,’ ‘tedious,’ ‘very amusing,’ ‘too gross to print,’ and ‘obscene.’ Those divided judgements come just from the people (the editors, the publishers, and the lawyers) who were tasked with getting this extremely bizarre, frequently filthy text into print. For most of the last two hundred years, significant sections of the diary were deemed unpublishable, thanks to Pepys’s habits of describing court scandals, his sex life, and his bowel movements. Since nothing could be more intriguing than a secret diary too shocking to print, this censorship only increased the public’s fascination. 

Joanna Nadin, "Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes'"

Dr Joanna Nadin is the author of more than 90 books for children, teenagers and adults, including the Sunday Times-bestselling series The Worst Class in the World, and the Carnegie-nominated Joe All Alone, which is now a BAFTA-winning and Emmy-nominated BBC drama. She is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol and lives in Bath.

 

About Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of "Yes", by Joanna Nadin
Birdy Arbuthnot’s Year of "Yes" follows 18-year-old Margaret "Birdy" Arbuthnot from Surbiton to Soho in 1960, on her quest for a life less ordinary, and more like one in the novels she reads. It’s a companion novel to the Carnegie-nominated A Calamity of Mannerings, which was also a Sunday Times Book of the Week. The cover is by Anna Morrison, who also designed Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren.

1960 is knocking on the door, and eighteen-year-old Margaret "Birdy" Arbuthnot, presently of Surbiton, wants more than her current existence in the dull suburbs. She wants to LIVE – in capital letters! Could Soho, with its bright lights and dark corridors, hold the key to a life more novel-like and less … Surrey? (Even if Mummy thinks it is a square mile of vice, full of men with overly shiny shoes).

At the cusp of the new year, Birdy resolves to only say "yes" to everything for the next twelve months. She can’t possibly realise that her biggest "yes" will launch her directly into the London orbit of the aristocratic Mannering family, and transform her life into one worth writing novels about. 

From Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of "Yes" 

DECEMBER 1959

Saturday 26th December

11 a.m.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Or, rather, I tried to, but the sink is perilously small and slippery, the ceramic draining board is horribly cold, and I was just wondering whether or not to run the hot water lest I get chilblains when my mother walked in. She said at eighteen it was high time I grew out of all that "Cassandra Mortmain nonsense" and in any case she needed it for scrubbing potatoes as Aunt Barbara (ambitious, bunions) and Uncle Roy (obsessed with war and golf) are coming for lunch, so please go and do whatever it is I was doing in somewhere more suitable, i.e. the dining room. I was about to point out that I am barred from the dining room (for reasons I cannot be bothered to explain here but suffice to say I vehemently disagree with) but I could tell she was in no mood to brook argument (her lips go inexplicably thin) so I have come upstairs to my bedroom and she has gone back to doing something inventive with mince.

So, in actuality, I write this sitting on lavender candlewick, whilst wishing, yet again, that my life were more novel-like. I shouldn’t even mind if it wasn’t I Capture the Castle, however attractive moving to a dilapidated mansion in East Anglia might be; I’d settle for anything disaffected and preferably French – like Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse, perhaps. Sadly there is no chance of torrid poolside affairs in Surbiton, where private swimming pools and disaffection are regarded with the same suspicion as are exotic pets and ambitious hair. Instead I am constrained by complete mediocrity. Even my name – Margaret – is average (Princess Margaret notwithstanding, as she is a goddess amongst women). Why can I not be a Calypso? A Viola? A Genevieve?