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. 

David Morley, "Passion"

 

David Morley, photo by Graeme Oxby

David Morley’s last book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. 

About Passion, by David Morley 
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature’s Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers,’ pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters.’ There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet’s authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

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

From Passion

Dialect

Evening froze to a night nailed with stars.
I watched a birdbox fill with flying words
fleeing the chill by bundling in on each other.

I took the box from its hook and prised its lid
and shook the lives of language out of it
festooning my table with wings and feathers,
writhing, fluttering, like a bird made of birds:

Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, 
Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, 
Feather Poke, Hedge Jug, Prinpriddle,
Ragamuffin, Billy-featherpoke, Puddneypoke,
Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, 
Long Pod, Bush Oven, and Miller’s Thumb.

I tucked them in this box before they woke.

We Make Manx Shearwaters Vomit Bottlecaps

‘Here is what a stomach full of plastic
looks like’, says the bird reserve warden. 
‘You can see it stretched so much that the shapes 
of plastic are visible. When I say we make 
shearwaters vomit bottle caps I’m not exaggerating.’ 
He twists the dead Manxie on its back, 
snipping the sac open. His forceps fossick 
into the dissected bird. Rubbish piles up 
by the body. I try to focus on the wing feathers.

Eye-bright and gliding over wave crests
the shearwater rides on updraught and jetstream. 
A placid sea is her unploughed field.
The bird bends on the blade of storm to turn 
the seabed over, drive deep swells to the surface.
The wind swings north, the moon’s gravity 
tilts the sea-surge. For phytoplankton this
is everything life needs, and they flicker 
and breed in that frenzy of crosscurrents
the fish following the glut of plankton
dumped on the surface like data 
from the dark. The shearwater’s compass 
stills, she stabs straight into the undertow 
where her fish-prey spiral in their bait-ball
like an underwater galaxy, a million stars 
spawning in a nebula of bioluminescence.

The warden stares up at me: ‘Don’t look away.’
  
This is what a poem full of plastic looks like.

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? 

Rishi Dastidar, "A hobby of mine"

Rishi Dastidar’s poetry has been published by the Financial Times, New Scientist and the BBC, amongst many others. His third collection, Neptune’s Projects (Nine Arches Press), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize, and a poem from it was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2024. He is also editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). He reviews poetry for The Guardian and is chair of Wasafiri. His latest publication is A hobby of mine (Broken Sleep Books).

A hobby of mine, by Rishi Dastidar
My publisher says: “In A hobby of mine, Rishi Dastidar’s unrelenting catalogue of cultural observations becomes an absurd and profound portrait of modern life. With a playful spirit and incisive wit, Dastidar examines identity, memory, and the contradictions of everyday existence. He invites us to consider the idiosyncrasies that shape how we navigate a fragmented world, and the hidden dimensions of our routines: repetition becomes revelation – if we pay enough attention.”

I say: it was also a way for me to pay tribute and homage to Joe Brainard, and his wonderful memoir, I remember. Think of my attempt as a way exhausting some current obsessions, in a very George Perec-esque way too.

You can read more about A hobby of mine on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two extracts from the book. 

From A hobby of mine

Extract 1:

A hobby of mine is perverting the course of language.

A hobby of mine is the habit of mining.

A hobby of mine is wondering what the modern equivalent of mining school in nineteenth century Europe is.

A hobby of mine is running away to Rome.

A hobby of mine is imagining living in the south of France with a large of amount of cash that is demanding to be whittled away.

A hobby of mine is telling people why I haven’t launched a Substack yet.

A hobby of mine is deciding which of the endangered heritage crafts I should attempt to pick up.

A hobby of mine is calling the sun my father.

A hobby of mine is sitting in the middle of the road, crying that the passing scooters won’t stop and play with me.

A hobby of mine is wishing I was a cat.

A hobby of mine is knowing I would have been a very good clerk for the East India Company.

A hobby of mine is cultivating an emollient aspect to my personality.

Extract 2:

A hobby of mine is asking: how would David Foster Wallace have written it?

A hobby of mine is attempting to write things the way David Foster Wallace might have done, and failing.

A hobby of mine is buying any second-hand edition of The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth I ever see.

A hobby of mine is Tabasco.

A hobby of mine is predicting when money dies.

A hobby of mine is predicting when Miami sinks.

A hobby of mine is thinking up sports entertainment formats for a post-apocalyptic planet.

A hobby of mine is re-litigating the past until it asks to be taken from the courtroom and hanged until it is dead.

A hobby of mine is saying ‘wait till next year’ even though I know my team will be crap then also.

A hobby of mine is only reading my horoscope when I feel some part of my life is out of control.

A hobby of mine is opening all the cupboards in the kitchen looking for chocolate to eat, even though I know there isn’t any in the house.

"Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic," ed. Will Buckingham and Hannah Stevens (Wind&Bones)

About Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic 
Four writers, four stories, and four languages, Tâigael is a first-of-its-kind collaborative writing and translation project, bringing together the cultures of Scotland and Taiwan to find new and surprising connections. From elderly prophets on the Taipei subway to sheep tangled in brambles by the roadside in rural Scotland, and from a goddess of saliva who disappears without trace to an unexpected guest at a Hogmanay party, these stories cross between languages and cultures to reimagine the past, present and future. For the project, Wind&Bones worked with writers Elissa Hunter-Dorans (Scotland), Kiú-kiong 玖芎 (Taiwan), Lisa MacDonald (Scotland) and Naomi Sím (Taiwan) to write and collaboratively translate between Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), via Mandarin and English. These are stories that weave together myth, dream and everyday life, as they reveal unexpected parallels between these two languages, their historical marginalisation, and their revival.

Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese and Gaelic will be published by Wind&Bones Books on 15th June 2025. You can pre-order the book here. If you pre-order by 1st May, 2025, your name will be listed in the final edition, in appreciation of your support.

About Wind&Bones
Wind&Bones Books is a small, non-profit indie press founded by University of Leicester PhD graduate Dr Hannah Stevens, and former De Montfort University Reader in Writing and Creativity, Dr Will Buckingham. Wind&Bones also run projects exploring writing, storytelling and philosophy for social change. Hannah and Will currently split their time between Scotland, Taiwan and sometimes Leicester. You can head to their website to find out more here.   

Literary Leicester 2025 Podcasts

 

You can now listen to podcasts of the brilliant events at Literary Leicester Festival 2025 here.

These include:

• The Creative Writing Student Showcase 2025 here. Speakers included Sonya Hundal, Anna Walsh, Joe Bedford, Aidan Trulove, Laura Besley, Olivia Peachey, Kimaya Patil, Cate Morris, Shauna Strathmann, Daneil Hibberd, Nina Walker, Aarini Mehta, Sandra Shaji, Dave Clarke. 
• The "Bullying, School and Power" event, with Morag Edwards, James Scudamore and Jonathan Taylor, here. 
• The "Voices from the Other Side of Hope" event here. 
• Kit de Waal on The Best of Everything here. 
• "The Air We Breathe: How to Write about Our Air and Our Future" event here. 

And there are many others!

Morag Edwards / Isobel Ross, "Almost Boys: The Psychology of Co-Ed Boarding in the 1960s"

 

Before retiring, Morag Edwards had worked as an educational psychologist for over thirty years, with a career focus on children who had experienced early relationship trauma and neglect. She was a published author before leaving work but the demands of family and professional life meant that her writing ambitions, while powerful and enduring, had always remained stuck within the margins of her life. Morag now writes historical fiction as Morag Edwards and is published by Bloodhound Books. The third volume in her Jacobite trilogy, The Jacobite’s Heir, is due to be published in September 2025. Morag writes contemporary fiction as Isobel Ross, also published by Bloodhound Books, and is working hard on completing another domestic suspense novel. 

Morag recently gave a talk at Literary Leicester Festival 2025, as part of the "Bullying, School and Power" event, along with James Scudamore and Jonathan Taylor. You can listen to the podcast of the event here.  

About Almost Boys, by Morag Edwards / Isobel Ross
Morag was a pupil at a co-educational boarding school in Scotland from 1965 to 1971. Unique about this school was that boy boarders far outnumbered girl boarders and by the late 1960s, the adults in charge had become confused about their duty of care. She now uses her background to help others understand the psychological implications of early boarding for young children and actively campaigns to end early boarding. 

Under the author name Isobel Ross, Morag has written a memoir about her own boarding school experience: Almost Boys: The Psychology of Co-Ed Boarding in the 1960s. The narrative is based upon her memories and diaries written between 1969 and 1971, embedded within the framework of developmental psychology, Attachment Theory and Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs). The memoir was self-published early in 2024, in order to catch a growing wave of concern that young children were still sent away from their families to be educated. This proved to be the right decision, as Morag has regularly been asked to appear on podcasts, webinars and speak at conferences, providing a voice for women ex-boarders, particularly those who attended co-ed establishments, currently under-represented in the growing boarding school literature. 

From Almost Boys
In my first winter living in Fairview, I wouldn’t hurry back to the boarding house after school. Instead, I stayed behind in the dusk, on the school steps, watching the day girls amble towards their lamp-lit homes, chattering in groups. I felt an aching hunger for a place that might feel homely. Even without a parent actually present, the parents’ homemaking would create a continuity of care for these girls. There would be a gas or electric fire, a television, a tin of biscuits, coats and shoes in the hall. During term time, I struggled to remember my home, even though my older sister was now a boarder. It seemed to exist behind an opaque wall, a place that never truly came into focus. School was real and vivid, each moment lived in the present but couldn’t be talked about at home. My parents’ interest was limited and explanations of the cultural minutiae felt too lengthy and complicated. Unsure and lacking confidence about their decision to send us away, once we were at home it was clear they did not want to hear about our lives at school, embedding and reinforcing the gap between our home selves and our school personalities. 

Adam Roberts, "Lake of Darkness"

Adam Roberts was born in 1965 in London. He studied English and Classics at Aberdeen University, did a PhD at Cambridge and is now Professor of 19th Century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published 26 novels, all (except one) science fiction, and intends to continue doing so. His latest novel is Lake of Darkness (Gollancz 2024).

 

About Lake of Darkness, by Adam Roberts
An expedition to explore a black hole discovers, or seems to, that some being or beings are living inside the event horizon. A crewmember, Raine, claims he has been contacted by a being he calls "The Gentleman," goes murderously mad, and kills all his crewmates. Evil passes like a contagion through the utopian societies of the far future. A second expedition is mounted and returns to the black hole. Its lead scientist, Guunarsonsdottir, is convinced an alien species has evolved inside the exacting conditions of the black hole, and that communications can be opened across the event horizon. Joyns, a mission specialist, comes to fear that something malevolent, an ancient evil, is inside the black hole, wanting to escape. The mood aboard the ship deteriorates, and the crew split into two factions, fighting amongst themselves. Joyns is confined to quarters.

You can read more about Lake of Darkness on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

 

From Lake of Darkness
But she couldn’t sleep. She turned from her left to her right side and then again to her left, feeling the slight difference when she turned with the direction of spin as opposed to against it. She instructed the room to turn out all lights but then felt abandoned and scared in the dark, and so ordered the lights back on, to shine a low yellow-orange glow. She lay on her back. She tried to compose her mind into a meditative state, but it wouldn’t settle. She got up and knelt and prayed, but it was a vacancy, a mere going through the motions, and she soon stopped.

It was impossible to sleep.

At one point she heard two people outside her room. Given the great size of the startship and the relatively small number of crew, this was odd. Joyns sat up, believing they had specifically come to speak with her, and wondering why they hadn’t simply called her. But they hadn’t come to her.

There were two of them, one who sounded a little like Samuel, the other whose voice she didn’t recognise. That struck Joyns as odd, because she thought Guunarsonsdottir had barricaded herself and her followers in a separate part of the ship. But there they were, outside her room. Or their voices at any rate. Perhaps the barricade had been breached and Guunarsonsdottir’s followers were on the run. Perhaps they themselves were staging a raid behind enemy lines. The two of them were talking loudly about the best way of incapacitating Saccade—which must mean not only that Saccade had arrived, but the news of her advent must have reached Guunarsonsdottir’s portion of the ship as well. One of the two, perhaps Samuel said, distinctly, "kill her, it’s the only way" and the other person, Joyns didn’t recognise their voice, said: "she’s really here! really! she’s here!" and then laughed like a cat miaowing, then their voices dropped and Joyns couldn’t follow them. There followed a strange melange of sounds, scrapings and gruntings and smacking sounds, and it took Joyns a moment to piece together than the two figures were grappling and fighting one another.

Then there was a loud slapping sound, and the sound of somebody running away, their footsteps slightly syncopated by the fact that one foot was placed more spinwise than the other.

Had both parties run away? Was one lying wounded or dead outside her door?

Joyns contemplated getting up and checking, but a deep resistance to the idea occupied her limbs. She sat up and checked the ship’s time. One minute to midnight—the startship’s arbitrary midnight, by which the arbitrary business of timekeeping was calibrated, as it was on a million ships and habitats around the inhabited galaxy. I should get up, she told herself. But she did not.

It was dead midnight and the lights in her room glowed blue.

She hadn’t told the room to change the colour, and it was a chilly, morbid shade of blue that was accompanied by a distinct drop in temperature. She hadn’t ordered that either! It certainly wasn’t going to help her get to sleep, so she said "Room!" preparatory to ordering it to restore the earlier light and heat settings when she saw she was not alone.

She saw at once who it was: the Gentleman. He was dressed in a mauve jacket and trousers, the jacket sharply cut and folded over a harlequin-green shirt and necktie, after the manner and style of an actor in an historical drama. He carried a walking stick shaped like the Hebrew letter vav. His face was lean and sharp-featured. Joyns was not a fan of antique painted art and so was unaware of the old Vannick painting The Arnolfini Betrothal, but had she ever seen that image she would have recognised the face of the man in her visitor (though not the lavish Flemish cloak; the Gentleman wore nothing so voluminous). And here he was, as—Joyns assumed—he had appeared to Raine, years before. He was seated in a chair that had not been there before, surveying Joyns with prominently-lidded eyes.

"Good grief," said Joyns.

"Half right," said the Gentleman.

"You’re not here," Joyns said. She drew herself back along the floor, and rested her spine against the wall of her room. If she sprinted she would surely reach the door before the Gentleman could stop her. Indeed, it looked, from his demeanour and his posture, as if any decision on his part to rise from his seat would be a leisurely and unhurried business. But then she thought: he appeared instantly from nowhere. She thought: if I rush the door he’ll be there in the way before I move an inch. Then she reassured herself: he was a vision, a hallucination, and certainly not real. "You," she reiterated, "are not here."

"Here," he said looking around, "is a more complicated concept than perhaps you give it credit." 

Hannah Lutz, "Wild Boar," trans. Andy Turner

 

Hannah Lutz was born in 1984 and grew up in Ekenäs, in southern Finland. She has an MA from Finland’s Åbo Akademi University. She later moved to Denmark and attended the Writing School in Copenhagen. Still based in Denmark, she lives just outside Roskilde. Her short story ‘Den elfte versionen’ / ‘The Eleventh Version’ won the Umeå Short Story Award, Sweden, in 2011. Vildsvin / Wild Boar is Lutz’s debut novel. Written in Swedish, it was first published as the Danish translation in 2016 by Rosinante in Denmark; the original Swedish text was first published in 2017 by Förlaget in Finland and Albert Bonniers Förlag in Sweden. Her second novel, Selma, was published by Förlaget in Finland and Gutkind in Denmark in 2023.

About Wild Boar, by Hannah Lutz
To witness. To contain. To hunt.

The forests of Småland are home to a growing population of wild boar, once on the verge of extinction. They move in packs at night. Gardens are destroyed, farmland churned up. Yet their illusiveness draws in both visitors and inhabitants.

Ritve is making a pilgrimage from Finland to track them down. Council worker Glenn finds his quiet life disturbed by their night-time visits and his visions of apocalypse. Mia hopes her local history residency in the old primary school will help her grandfather recover his memory and voice.

Told by three people newly arrived in an isolated community, Wild Boar is a compelling and poetic debut from Finland-Swedish author Hannah Lutz about animals and people, their places in a changing ecosystem, and their capacities to grow and to destroy. It is translated from the Swedish by Andy Turner.

You can read more about Wild Boar on the publisher's website here. Below, you can an excerpt from the opening of the novel. 

From Wild Boar

I have seen them, the wild boar, they have found their way into my dreams! Now I know the way they move, the sounds they make when they sneak into the gardens. I have to listen carefully to hear their trotters and snouts in the grass. They are so numerous, so solid, and yet they make such light work of quietly moving around, it’s incredible. Here I am, heavy and warm with sleep. I open the curtains, see the sea. The sheets on the bed are white. 

This is what I know of Hornanäs: to get there I will make my way to Småland, to Tingsryd, and midway between Tingsryd and Linneryd I’ll turn right. In the village there are four or five occupied houses, three or four abandoned ones. In a yellow house, surrounded by apple trees, lives Arnold Falkberg. The landscape is made up of lakes and productive forest. Wild boar hunting is permitted throughout the year. 

Arnold Falkberg often has a camera with him when he is in the forest. Many people film wild boar, most focusing on the hunting. I’ve seen the clips they post on YouTube. In a Swedish Television documentary, Arnold Falkberg is known as The Hunter of Hornanäs, his hunting rifle propped against the armchair during the interview. But now I’ve seen the footage he’s posted, I don’t believe he’s fired a shot at a single wild boar in his life. The hand holding that camera is intent on something completely different.