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. 

Kit de Waal, "The Best of Everything"

Congratulations to Kit de Waal, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, whose new novel, The Best of Everything, has just been published!

Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. In 2022 it was adapted for television by the BBC. It is now on the GCSE curriculum for schools. Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women's Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. A collection of short stories, Supporting Cast, was published in 2020. An anthology of working-class memoir, Common People, was crowdfunded and edited by Kit in 2019. Her memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes was published in August 2022. Kit founded her own TV production company, Portopia Productions, and the Big Book Weekend, a free digital literary festival in 2020 and has written for theatre and television. She was named the FutureBook Person of the Year 2019 and is patron of Prisoners Abroad, The Bridport Prize and Writing West Midlands. She is also an ambassador for Wellbeing in the Arts and the Listening Books, on the Advisory Board of Dead Ink Books and a trustee of The Reading Agency. Kit is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor and Jean Humphreys Writer in Residence at Leicester University. Her new novel The Best of Everything was released in April 2025.

About The Best of Everything, by Kit de Waal

She's the last person who would call herself a heroine. But she's given him a whole new reason to live.

Paulette's the kind of woman who likes the future all mapped out: the wedding to Denton, the Caribbean honeymoon, the gingham quilt on the baby's crib. Until one morning Garfield, Denton's friend, arrives at her door with news she just can't take in: that Denton won't be coming around anymore, that there won't be time for her to say goodbye. 

Somehow Garfield finds his way into her bed, if not her heart, and sooner than anyone can believe there is a baby, and suddenly giving Bird, her son, the best of everything is what gives Paulette's life meaning.

So why is it another little boy, Nellie, who keeps Paulette awake at night? Nellie who is being raised a few streets away with no sign of a mum, with a grandfather who is obviously struggling. Surely Paulette is the last person who should be getting tangled up in any of that? The Best of Everything is a novel about what it means to care, to learn to live in the aftermath of loss, and the love that can steal into our lives - in spite of the best laid plans.

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

From The Best of Everything

Midnight.

Paulette is still awake. A thin, freezing wind slips through an inch of open window and makes the curtains dance. When the room is cool, Denton sleeps heavy and won’t feel the weight of her head on his chest or the leg she drapes over his, running the sole of her foot from his knee to his ankle. She pulls one of his arms around her shoulders like a fur stole and nestles in. Skin on skin. The smell of Denton is pure man – sweat, soap and sex.

Bonfire Night come Saturday. Paulette’s going to ask Denton if they can go to the big display in town and watch the rockets and Catherine wheels making patterns in the sky. They could eat candyfloss and toffee apples and mingle with the crowd. He could wear the good leather driving gloves she got him last week. The thing is, Denton never likes to make plans too far in advance, says he doesn’t know his shifts and he doesn’t like to let her down at the last minute. There again, Saturday is only three days away, so Paulette is hoping. She feels a warm slick of sweat run off her breast and, suddenly, she’s too hot. She doesn’t sleep so good when Denton stays over because the man takes up more than his own half of the bed, and anyway, she likes to make the most of their time together.

She slips from under the blankets and shucks on her dressing gown, the one he bought her for her birthday, the one he didn’t even get a chance to wrap so she saw the price tag. Paulette had to pretend she didn’t notice because the thing wasn’t that expensive, but she had to remember they were saving, saving, saving. A house one day. Semi-detached, car on the drive, flowers in the front garden on a nice quiet road, grass on the verge and street lights that worked. That’s the plan. They’re a year and a half into it with a couple more to go. Before long, she’ll have everything she wants. Patience, Paulette.

Nigel Pantling, "A Foreign Country"

Nigel Pantling served as an officer in the British Army of the Rhine during the Cold War and in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles," as private secretary to Home Office Ministers under the Thatcher Government, and as a merchant banker in the years of rampant mergers and acquisitions of the 1990s. For the 25 years since he has been a strategic adviser to company chief executives. Nigel lives in north London and Somerset. A Foreign Country is his fifth poetry collection. 

About A Foreign Country, by Nigel Pantling
A Foreign Country takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and each serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey through different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.  

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

From A Foreign Country

Meeting the General

He’s waiting for me at a reinforced bunker,

a few miles west of Panmunjon.

His arm round my shoulder,

he leads me to the border viewpoint.

He sets out the geography and the history, 

adjusting my perspective along with my binoculars, 

and enlightens me on American imperialism.

We get on well.

Later, his gold tooth glints

when he smiles for the one permitted photograph.

He hopes that I will return soon 

to visit a unified country.

He shakes my hand for the second time,

lights another American cigarette, glints again.

Bosra 

I’m up in the gods, not literally, 

not with Bel or belligerent Baalshamin, 

or Astarte or Atargatis, givers of fertility, 

but theatrically, on the fifty-first tier 

of a semicircle of black basalt blocks. 

I’m sitting quite alone under the sun, 

without benefit of the cloth shading 

or misty spray of perfumed water 

that cooled second century patrons, 

so all I can manage is to stay still 

and watch tourists from a waiting bus 

walk purposefully on from the wings, 

and imagining themselves unseen 

hurtle through some Shaw or Wilde 

or mangle “all the world’s a stage”, 

and thanks to the acoustic skills of 

Roman architects I hear each word. 

Until the heat becomes too much 

and I make my way down to give 

my one-man rendering of Godot.

Nuala O'Connor, "Menagerie"

Nuala O'Connor, photo by Úna O'Connor

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her poetry and fiction have been widely published, anthologised, and won many literary awards. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her novel NORA (New Island), about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was a Top 10 historical novel in the New York Times. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in late March 2025. Her website is here. 

About Menagerie, by Nuala O'Connor
Menagerie is Nuala’s fifth poetry collection, and her first since 2011. It is a book that centres on casting a compassionate, language-loving eye on the animal world, on neurodivergence, on writing, on marriage and familial love, and on art and politics. Carl Phillips, writing in the Irish Times said Menagerie has ‘a warm feelingful generosity of vision and a distant, diagnostic eye … a collection which is at once involving and clear-sighted.’

From Menagerie

Plum

         

          A poem can’t take the place of a plum. 

- Sylvia Plath

Your glaucous bloom is easily wiped away,
one thumb stroke and you are ruby-skinned again,
a firm bed for lips to wrap around.

But you are a frightening prospect;
your skin might make teeth ache, your flesh
may pull a stripe of bitterness over my tongue.

Still, I am willing to plunge in.
I take you in my mouth,
for better, for worse.


Psychopomp

Desire stretches, elongates, it is cat-paw dogged
and I give in, allow my fingers to scroll and tap.
I want more basalt and gold, seed-pearl and jet,
more hair wefted through its own warp, the strands
of the inscrutable dead, snapped behind back-glass.

My treasure box is a tomb of sepia strangers
but I dreamt my mournful trinkets were stolen,
all gone, those turquoise and vulcanite sarcophagi
meant for lapels and bosom-nesting chains –
grim thieves mocked and saw me off, empty-handed.

So here I am again, haunting online marketplaces,
a banshee keening unknowable but felt losses,
a reaper in search of fresh souls to stack,
in order to stuff my communal vault,
with memento mori, with memento vivere.

Sophie Haydock, "Madame Matisse"

Sophie Haydock is an author, editor and journalist based in Folkestone, Kent. She is also curator of Folkestone Book Festival. Her debut novel, The Flames, was published in 2022. Her second novel, Madame Matisse, about the women who were integral to the life of the French artist Henri Matisse, was published by Doubleday in March 2025.

Sophie will be giving a guest talk, "Madame Matisse: The Women Who Made the Artist," at the University of Leicester on Wednesday 30 April 2025 at 5.30pm. With Harry Whitehead, she will be discussing the women who shaped the life of the artist Henri Matisse, and the process of turning history into fiction. You can see more details about the event and book a place here. 

About Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock
Madame Matisse is an fictionalised exploration of the women who played pivotal yet often overlooked roles in the life of the iconic artist Henri Matisse. Through the lives of three extraordinary women, Sophie Haydock paints an emotional portrait of art, love and sacrifice.

At the heart of the story is Amélie, Matisse's wife, whose quiet devotion to her husband's genius leaves her own dreams to wither in the shadows. Her unwavering support is the foundation of Matisse’s career, but it comes at a steep personal cost.

Then there is Lydia Delectorskaya, the dazzling Russian émigrée who becomes Matisse’s muse and confidante. With her fierce independence and enigmatic past, Lydia’s relationship with Matisse is as passionate as it is fraught, as she grapples with her own identity and her complex role in his creative world. 

When his wife, after forty years of marriage, delivers a desperate ultimatum, a question is born: who will Matisse choose? And what explosions lie ahead?

Finally, Marguerite, Matisse's daughter, emerges as a voice of resistance, forging her own path and confronting the turbulent undercurrents of her family dynamic. As she struggles to define herself outside her father’s shadow, Marguerite challenges the boundaries of art, family and love.

Set against the vibrant canvas of 1930s France, Madame Matisse is a tale of ambition, betrayal and the indelible impact these women had on Matisse’s artistic legacy. Their stories of resilience and sacrifice offer a powerful reflection on the often-unseen forces behind the creation of greatness.

You can read more about Madame Matisse here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Madame Matisse
Make no mistake: Lydia doesn’t care for beauty, certainly doesn’t chase after it as currency, though she understands the privileges it affords her, as a woman about to turn twenty-nine, with pale skin, ice-blonde hair and blue eyes. She has caught the eyes of enough men in her time, usually the wrong kind. But Lydia knows such beauty is not a thing to build a life upon; it will not last for more than a handful of years, nor would she want it to.

She’s sitting alone in the dark with the cool instrument clasped to her breast, lost in a meditative daze, when she hears Monsieur Matisse calling for her. There’s a shift in his tone.

Lydia returns the gun to her father’s briefcase and checks the clasps are locked securely, pushing her thumbs up against them to test for weaknesses, to see if Amélie’s meddling has inflicted permanent damage. Then she conceals the case once more, hidden until the time comes.

Once it is safely put away, she passes from her room, down the stairs, to the studio where Monsieur Matisse spends his days. Birds call from their cages, wings darting. The artist has his back to her as he tops up their seed. She notices the slope of his shoulders, pulling at the centre of his taupe jacket, the material tight between his shoulder blades. He feels her eyes on him and turns expectantly. Her gaze roams to the fireplace. She looks at a pair of pressed violets, long past their best, their colours faded after many years trapped behind a pane of glass.

"There you are, Lydia. It’s not like you to keep me waiting," he says gently.

There’s a seriousness to his features, and Lydia knows something has changed.

"Your wife was looking for you. Did she find you?" she asks.

He nods, and gestures that she take a seat.

He inhales. Pauses. Her body tenses as she waits for him to continue, her heart pounding. She waits for the words she knows are coming.

"I’m afraid my wife has given me an ultimatum," he says slowly.

Pam Thompson, "Sub/urban Legends"

 

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She has been widely published in magazines including Atrium, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures,The Alchemy Spoon, The High Window, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The North, The Rialto, Magma and Mslexia.  Pam’s last collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. A pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends has just been published Paper Swans Press (March 2025). Pam is a Hawthornden Fellow.

About Sub/urban Legends, by Pam Thompson
These poems cross and re-cross boundaries between the real and surreal and take imaginative leaps in form and subject matter. The New York School poets are presiding spirits and Eduard Munch puts in an appearance in a Welsh town. The poems don’t shy away from the darker side of life: loss, grief, mental illness, but there is joy and exuberance and hope. 

You can read more about Sub/urban Legends on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Sub/urban Legends

In New York City with my daughter

Outside the Whitney, a man sells red roses.

Mother’s Day. Inside, Berdie, Larry Rivers’ mother-in-law

is naked, twice. Every wrinkle and fold. After she died

O’Hara wrote, ‘Berdie, Berdie, where are you

and why?’ Schuyler loved her too.

On Brooklyn Bridge a cyclist shouts at a woman

who has wandered across his lane.

I turn to catch the views Georgia painted, read messages 

on love-locks chained to the rails, ‘I love you

Jay, Carina, Kim.’ Black heart drawn with a Sharpie.

Times Square—two living-statues of Liberty,

bickering through green rubber masks. Rap 

boys pull out stooges from Asia, Australia, the UK—

all brag and swagger, leap over them. Our cameras

OD on light—we lose our bearings, just by looking up.

The Glass Strawberry 

My friend sent his boyfriend a single rose for Valentine’s Day.

It arrived with its head cut off. His boyfriend bought 

him three cacti and put them on a fold-up table

which collapsed which is bizarre because it reminds me

of my daughter’s early Christmas present: three small cacti,

packed flat and posted, wearing woolly hats and scarves.

My cacti lean together in the kitchen window.

My friend sends people care-packages when they’re ill.

I told him I’d read about ‘strawberries,’ little treats 

we should give ourselves when we’re sad, sitting in the sun, 

or stroking a cat, to boost our endorphins.

A homeless man he worked with called them ‘dolphins.’ 

My friend sent me a glass strawberry that’s cool

and slightly spiky. I like to hold it but the glass heart 

with severed arteries stays in its red satin box. 

We have both been in the desert for ages 

but our cacti have pink flowers, are taller than us 

and hold out their arms. And the dolphins leap and leap.

Nearly Easter News 2025

It's been a while since our last News post, and lots has been happening in the last few months in the Centre for New Writing, so here is an update on student and staff news at Leicester. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who helps make this such a vibrant place to be! You can read our previous News article, from November 2024, here. 

News

Firstly, congratulations to all the MA Creative Writing students and MA Modern and Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing students who graduated in January 2025!

Congratulations to everyone involved in the hugely successful Literary Leicester Festival, 19th to the 22nd March 2025. It was an amazing celebration of literature, with lots of different events and authors. Special congratulations here to all the students involved in this year's Creative Writing Student Showcase, who made it such a brilliant event. 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. 

There have also been lots of wonderful Centre for New Writing events this term with visiting authors and writing professionals. You can read about this term's guest masterclasses and workshops here. There are still more to come after Easter, including a public masterclass by Kit de Waal on Tuesday 13 May (see details here), a talk by author Sophie Haydock on 30 April (see details here), and the Annual Creative Writing Lecture, this year given by Eimear McBride on 6 May (see details here). 

Everybody's Reviewing, our review blog, has now had over 500,000 readers, and Creative Writing at Leicester has now had 350,000 readers! Thanks to all our authors, editors, students, reviewers, bloggers and readers. If you've not done so already, do have a look at our "Favourite Reads of 2024" round-up on Everybody's Reviewing here.  

Rosalind Adam, MA Creative Writing graduate, has had her poem "Decomissioned" published in Amethyst Review here. 

Kirsten Arcadio has reviewed Android Author by Sapphira Olson on Everybody's Reviewing here. Kirsten has now completed her PhD - congratulations! 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Laura Besley, who was named as a Top Tier Finalist in the Globe Soup Open Short Story Competition 2024. You can see more details here. She also won Second Prize in the Cranked Anvil Flash Fiction Competition. You can read her prize-winning story, "Perhaps on a Summer's Day," here. Her story "Like a Memory or Maybe Only a Dream" was shortlisted for the Mini Welkin Writing Prize. You can read it here. Laura's story "That meeting point where something is as close as it is far away" was runner-up in the Flash Fiction Festival Online Competition. You can read it here. Laura's story "When We Were Raucous" has been published by The Manchester Review here. 

Congratulations to New Walk Editions, which is co-directed by Nick Everett, and which was shortlisted for this year's Michael Marks Awards for poetry pamphlet publishers!

MA Creative Writing graduate Tracey Foster has reviewed The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way by Anthony Seldon for Everybody's Reviewing here, and Fewer Better Things by Glenn Adamson here. Tracey's haiku was longlisted for the Haiku Foundation's competition on the theme of dreams. You can read her haiku and other longlisted entries here. 

Kim Wiltshire has reviewed The Granite Kingdom by PhD graduate Tim Hannigan on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Kathy Hoyle, PhD Creative Writing student, has stories published in both the Northern Gravy Children's and Young Readers' Anthology and the Northern Gravy Fiction Anthology. Her story "Cockleshell Girl" has been nominated by South Florida Poetry Journal for Best Small Fiction 2024. Kathy's story "Humbug Shark" is published by Does It Have Pockets? here. Kathy's story "Gallows Pole" has also been nominated for Best Microfiction by New Flash Fiction Review. In March, Kathy chaired a discussion at Sunderland Museum with author Louise Powell about oral history and poetry. You can read more about this discussion here. Kathy has interviewed Louise Powell for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

BA Journalism student Saskia Kabongo undertook work experience on Everybody's Reviewing for a couple of weeks in February. She interviewed authors Lisa Bent and Rasheda Ashanti Malcolm for the site, and reviewed Loveless by Alice Osman here, Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid here, and Me Before You by Jojo Moyes here. Congratulations and thanks to Saskia! 

Congratulations to Amirah Mohiddin, who passed her viva for her PhD in Creative Writing in November. You can read more about Amirah's PhD project on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to Creative Writing graduate Hannah Mitchell, whose essay "Three" has been published on The Audacity here.

Anna O'Sullivan, MA Modern and Contemporary Literature and Creative Writing graduate, has written about her MA Dissertation in Creative Writing here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Cathi Rae, who passed her viva in December! Congratulations too for the re-publication of her poetry collection, Your Cleaner Hates You, by Coalville C.A.N. You can read more about the collection here. One of the directors of the publisher is MA Creative Writing graduate Constantine. 

Sally Shaw has reviewed Red Runs the Witch's Thread by Victoria Williamson for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Extracts from Jonathan Taylor's memoir, A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons, have been published on MIT's Press Reader here.  His article "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known About Bullying" is in the Morning Star here. His article for the charity Kidscape, "Bullying Is ...", is published here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Jane Simmons has four poems featured in the new anthology Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined, ed. Anne Milon and Rory Waterman (Five Leaves, 2025).

PhD student Nina Walker has written about Amateur Hour's second zine and her experience of workshopping with this group of graduates and students on Creative Writing at Leicester here.  

Anna Walsh, MA Creative Writing student, has written about the regular Leicester event "Rough Draft" on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to Harry Whitehead, whose novel White Road will be published by Claret Press in September 2025! You can read more about it here. On the 22nd April 2025, Harry will be reading from his novel and talking to Kevan Manwaring as part of the "Writing the Earth" online event hosted by Bournemouth Arts University. You can sign up for this free event here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Lee Wright has reviewed Father's Father's Father by Dane Holt on Everybody's Reviewing here, The Viaduct by David Wheldon here, and Two Sisters by Blake Morrison here. His personal essay, "Old Oslo," is published by Cigarette Fire Literary Magazine here. 

Lisa Marie Basile, "SAINT OF"

 

Lisa Marie Basile is an NYC-based author, poet, and journalist. She is the author of a few collections of poetry, including SAINT OF, Nympholespy (finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards), Apocryphal, and Andalucia. Her work can be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Tinderbox Poetry, Spork Press, Best Small Fictions, Best American Experimental Writing, and more. She has also led workshops or spoken in panel discussions at Manhattanville College, Columbia University, Emerson College, Pace University, The Moon Studio, The Author’s Guild, Stanza Books, and more. She holds an MFA in writing from The New School in New York City. She is an advocate for chronic illness awareness and foster youth, and is the founding editor of Luna Luna. Her website is here. 

About SAINT OF
SAINT OF is a gilded exploration of hunger—the hunger for the erotic, the ancestral, the forbidden, divinity, and reclamation. With themes of grief, illness, and generational trauma woven alongside sensuality and beauty, this collection is both sacrament and defiance. It traces the contours of longing, ruin, and transformation, blurring the boundaries between the carnal and the celestial. These poems are not only an invocation of saints—they are a declaration of self.

You can read more about SAINT OF here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From SAINT OF, by Lisa Marie Basile

Naomi Booth, "raw content"

Naomi Booth is the author of the short-story collection Animals at Night and the novels Sealed and Exit Management. Her work has been listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, included in the Guardian’s Best Fiction of the Year, and shortlisted for the Edgehill Prize. Her story, ‘Sour Hall,’ which is set in the Calder Valley, won the Edgehill Reader’s Award and was adapted into an Audible Originals drama series. Naomi was born in Bradford and grew up in West Yorkshire. She now lives in York and is Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. Her new novel, raw content, is set between York and the Colne Valley, and is published in March 2025.

About raw content, by Naomi Booth
Grace’s work requires her to be careful. She spends her days reading and editing legal case files, making sure the latest judgments are published as quickly and accurately as possible.

But outside of her work, Grace is not a careful person. Her father’s history as a police officer working across an infamous case shadows her life, as does the violent history entrenched across the Colne Valley landscape of her childhood, and her fears often surface as recklessness. 

When Grace becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she tries to accommodate her boyfriend and the prospect of the baby in her life. But after the relief and strange joy of the birth, Grace starts to imagine all sorts of terrible injuries befalling her child. The steep stairs to her apartment, the kitchen scissors, a boiling kettle all suddenly hold visceral and overwhelming potential for disaster. The baby’s vulnerability terrifies her: fault-lines in her relationship begin to show, and her family history and repressed memories of violence break to the surface.

Tender, gripping and life-affirming, raw content tells the story of a woman grappling with a new form of love that feels like a disaster.

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

From raw content

I was born in the back of a Ford Fiesta, a mile shy of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. As my mother screamed and my father caught me – purple and larded with vernix – in his shaking hands, Jacqueline Hill’s body was being uncovered in the thick of nettles and dock and ragwort on a scrap of wasteland twenty miles away. She had disappeared the night before, becoming the final victim of the Yorkshire Ripper. 

I was born in the Colne Valley, into a seam of abandoned mills. The landscape of my childhood was Salendine Nook and Scarbottom and Titanic Mills. Derelict furnace chimneys and saw-tooth roofs were as intrinsic to the valley as the skylarks and meadow pipits that rose in the sky above us to the Pennine moortops. 

I grew up in a house ten miles, as the crow flies, from Saddleworth Moor, where children lay buried under gorse and heather in unmarked graves – if the crow were to fly up over Marsden Moor and Wessenden Reservoir, to the forbidden and terribly beautiful places: to Dovestones Edge and the Boggart Stones.

My childhood was a map marked with danger zones. Titanic Mills, filled with broken glass and pigeon shit, in which we were forbidden to play. The lanes and ginnels and car parks that run behind old coal yards and pubs, in which we were forbidden to play. The secluded crescents of greenspace next to the canal where people dumped old sofas and chest freezers and tins of paint, in which we were forbidden to play. Even the playground at the edge of our estate was to be accessed only in specific circumstances. It had to be daylight; it had to be before seven in the evening; we were not to speak to strangers; me and my sister must always stick together. We were never, ever, to wander away from the playground into the woods, where people sniffed glue and worse. We were never, ever to walk up towards Scapegoat Hill or Marsden Moor. 

Me and my sister were cared for. We were bathed and fed and clothed. But, as with many children, we couldn’t have told you if we were loved. Our experience of care came in the form of a warning.  

Drew Gummerson, "Saltburn"

Drew Gummerson is the writer of The Lodger, Me and Mickie James, Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel, and most recently, Saltburn. He is a Lambda Award finalist, Leicestershire Short Story Prize winner. His stories have been featured on BBC Radio 4, and in various anthologies. https://linktr.ee/drewgum

About Saltburn, by Drew Gummerson

Saltburn is a collection of six funny sad queer short stories, all set in the town of Saltburn which is in the north-east of England. I start with an apology  

May the residents of the real Saltburn-by-the-Sea and neighbouring towns forgive my mermaids, my nuclear power stations, my foetus museums and so on and so on. They were written with love.

Welcome to Saltburn, an extraordinary town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. 

In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.

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

From Saltburn

Warriors of the Wasteland

While their parents watched the actual war spin out on the TV news programme, Look North with Arthur Seagull and Molly Splat, the boys, and one other, being neither boy nor non-boy, played war games down on the mudflats. Setting themselves up into armies, Shirts vs. Skins, Terminators vs. Rambos, Circumcised vs. Hooded (Claws in common parlance, as in, ‘Are you a Claw or Non-Claw?’) they took up positions behind old abandoned shopping trolleys, in forts constructed from for-sale signs stolen from the overgrown gardens of long-derelict houses, and in the abandoned crumbling concrete Martello, stinking of tramps’ piss and filled with sad-looking wrinkled used, sometimes unused, condoms. They were Trojans, all of them.

And these poor innocents, they would go at each other with wild euphoric abandon.

Happy days. The country was never happier, more unified, than when it was at war. 

Except, just as in any war, there were dissenting voices.

Those who were not happy. Not exactly. 

For Sven Tosier-Gumshoe, being the smallest, feyest and, perhaps, because of his position as neither boy nor non-boy, when the war games were coming to their nightly close, ragged, careworn parents having started to line up like gulls along the pier rail, shouting out that it was time for their respective charges to hurry home for tea or there would be tanned hides all round, was the one who was, most often, taken hostage. 

A quick resolution was needed to finish the game. 

‘I’m Private Tosier-Gumshoe,’ they would say. ‘Fifteenth Seal Regiment. Identification Number 35654. I won’t tell you anything.’

Usually then they would come at them with a used condom filled with sand, or a live crab with snapping claws, or the rusty speculum Aart Jansen had stolen from his doctor dad aeons before, telling them with faked horror that a speculum was something you used to look up buttholes. 

‘OK,’ Sven would say, ‘I give in. Our army is massed behind the seal fort… Plans are to advance at midnight… The password is Valkensteeg 17. Just don’t hurt me. I’ll tell you anything.’