Hazel Stuart, "Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90"

 

Hazel Stuart has lived in Leicestershire since 2004. She was born and brought up in Aberfoyle, Scotland, and attended university in London. She has previously published an academic paper on Poststructuralism, an award-winning children's fiction series and, most recently, a creative contribution in the University of Leicester's Other Lives in Samuel Pepys's Diary e-book. She has an ongoing interest in early modern history and the intersection of politics, religion and the occult. 

About Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90, transcribed and annotated by Hazel Stuart
Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90 is a transcription of the private journal belonging to a brilliant Scottish minister, scholar and translator abroad in London in the early days of the Glorious Revolution. Visiting the capital to oversee the printing of the first ever Gaelic Bible, a project financed by the Royal Society's Robert Boyle, he chronicles the late-seventeenth-century city in meticulous detail. Through Kirk's remarkably tolerant and curious narration, we explore a city of religious diversity, toy with early modern science's understanding of second sight, and get to tag along to some of seventeenth-century London's best visitor attractions. This book is every bit as critical to historians as the diaries of Pepys or Evelyn. Beyond her faithful transcription of the commonplace book, Hazel Stuart has provided an introduction and notes, including the most comprehensive biography to date of its author, Robert Kirk, a man whose interest in second sight and fairies was ultimately to lead him to infamy. 

You can read more about Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90, here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90

March 21, 1689, I also saw Gresham College, where the Hall pertaining to the Royal Society is, bestowed for the use of inquirers into nature’s phenomenon and mysteries by –

It is in Bishop’s Street on left-hand as you go forth to Bishop’s Gate. There is a square court there and a pole for mathematical experiments. But the Hall containing the curious rarities is not large but full of all varieties, above 2000.

Among which the main that I remarked and remembered were three manucodiatas with plain bills, long wings and tail, travelling feet: I took a feather out of a wing of one of them, and out of the tail of the ostridge’s skin. The bird of Paradise is carnivorous. I saw the pelican black, its bill was broad and as big as my arm, with a collar beneath. A Hudson’s Bay partridge white and long, with a few black feathers in the tail. A serpent of East India 7 yards in length, a small head and body as big as my leg at the ankles. A cassowary, duskish black fowl as big as an ostrich for the bones, though not so long necked, the bones of his leg are as gross as those of a man’s arm. The neck about a yard and a half in length, the legs three quarters. The blackish brown pigritia in shape like a man, a big body, slender legs, it goes but a yard and a half a day, though tis bigger than a cat. It climbs a tree, eats itself fat with fruit, and becomes lean before it creeps to the root of the tree.

Creative Empathy: An Evening with Rob Gee and Jonathan Taylor

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

Join the Centre for New Writing, the Empathic Healthcare Society, and the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare for a special evening celebrating the power of creative writing to foster empathy, understanding and connection. Award-winning poet, performer and storyteller Rob Gee and author Jonathan Taylor will appear in conversation to explore the relationship between writing and empathy. The event is free and open to all. It takes place on Thursday 29 October, 6-pm, and you can register for tickets here. 

The event celebrates the Anthony Locke Empathic Healthcare Prizes for Creative Writing, recognising outstanding writing that engages with themes of compassion, understanding, care and human experience. Following a talk by Rob and Jonathan, there will be a reading of some of the brilliant entries to the competition.

Whether you are a creative writer, healthcare professional, student, or reader, you’re welcome to this celebration of the role of creativity in helping us understand one another.

About the Speakers
Rob Gee is a comic, poet, and ex- mental health nurse with over a decade of clinical experience. He has won over twenty awards for his solo shows and triumphed in major poetry slams, including the Edinburgh Slam and BBC Two's Why Poetry Matters Slam. He has performed over 3,000 shows globally, including at more than 100 international fringe festivals. He serves as patron for the Leicestershire Action for Mental Health Project (LAMP) and spent 12 years as the lead artist for Comedy Asylum, which runs comedy workshops and shows for individuals with severe mental illness. Shows include Forget Me Not: The Alzheimer's Whodunnit and AWOL: Two old men escape from a care home and go to a metal festival. He has published numerous books of poetry and edited anthologies celebrating the power of poetry for wellbeing.

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor and critic. He is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, and author of prize-winning novels, short story collections, and memoirs, including the beautifully empathic works of life-writing Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007) and A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024).

About the Prizes
In summer 2026 we ran a creative writing competition open to all medical and healthcare students at the University of Leicester, with prizes kindly sponsored by Anthony Locke, and the Centre for New Writing. The prize was judged by a committee including students from the Empathic Healthcare Society, Dr Jonathan Taylor, Dr Andy Ward, Dr Felicity James and Dr Rachel Winter.

The range of entries – moving, tender and empathic – showed how talented and expressive our students are. The evening will include a presentation of prize certificates, but all the entries deserve to be celebrated: the talk will be followed by a reading of a sample of the great short prose pieces and poems entered.

The event forms part of our larger conversation around the literary arts and healthcare, funded by the AHRC as part of the Empathy, Difficulty, Difference: Creative Curiosity in Practice project.

We look forward to welcoming you.

Rachel Burns, "My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses"

Rachel Burns lives in County Durham. She was awarded a DYCP Arts Council Grant in 2023. She won the Classical Association Poetry Prize in 2026. She was placed second in The Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry 2021 and second in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, including COAL (Smith/Doorstop) and North Country (Saraband). Rachel has facilitated poetry workshops for The Ginkgo Prize, Tees Women Poets, The Writing School and Creative Future. Her pamphlet, A Girl in a Blue Dress, is published by Vane Women Press. My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is published by Broken Sleep Books.

About My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses, by Rachel Burns
My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is a raw, propulsive book of poems and lyric prose that moves through teenage motherhood, addiction, poverty, care work, violence, and the long afterlife of classed shame with furious clarity and bruised humour. Across six sections, Burns writes from buses, pubs, kitchens, prisons, foodbanks, council estates, and the uneasy calm of nature reserves, allowing memory to return in flashcuts, refrains, and narrative riffs that feel as immediate as speech.

The collection's emotional range is wide, from the bleak comedy of survival and the tenderness of parenthood to the stark ache of friendship, loss, and what gets left behind, while recurring motifs of horses, film, music, and woodland destruction thread private life into a wider social landscape. It is a book that refuses respectability and refuses silence, insisting on testimony without polishing the edges.

You can read more about My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses

Love in the 80s

Rubik’s Cubes
& Fred Perry white polo shirts

The roller-disco Life – La-La-La-La
I’d watch you from my bedroom window

Doing bunny hops on your BMX 
Counting 1,2,3 like Hopscotch 

Wheeling my shopper bike
Through the metal gate

Riding around the green
In the hope you’d notice 

I’d graffiti my school book
I love Joe

Heart & cupid arrows
Dreamily dissecting a frog

You were sent to Ireland 
To fight in The Troubles

The mines & steelworks all gone
It was the army or the Monger’s Yard

You came back hyem
Not quite the same

I still think of you
As that boy 

Who changed
The colour of your hair

More times than I’d had hot dinners

School Bus Anthem 

I sit at the back with Shelley and Titch,
sharing a long cigarette, smoking it down to the fag end. 
Bernadette goes from seat to seat, can yer sponsor us 50p, pet?     
We all know the money isn’t for the starving babbies in Africa.

The big lads on the bus, bounce first years up and down, 
up and down, on their knees. This is the way the donkey’s ride,
the donkey’s ride, the donkey’s ride.

The old double-decker crawls up the bank, wheezing like a knackered miner.
We pile to one side, just as it hits the hairpin bend, knowing the driver, 
won’t make the gear change in time. 

The engine smokes, splutters and coughs, wheels spin backwards. 
Time rewinds. The bus grinds to a stop. We pile out the exit, 
a herd of untamed ants. The driver shakes a fist.
Ger off yer little bastards! Ger off! 
 

Anime, ADHD and Me

By Mathew Lopez-Bland

Having just failed his graduation exam for the third time, Naruto watches on as the rest of his classmates celebrate graduating from the ninja academy.

When I started pitching ideas for my PhD, I knew that I wanted to write about anime, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Japanese animation had been an ever-present in my life, ever since I’d first watched the Pokémon anime, back in the late 90s. Over the years, the medium had come to mean so much to me, but I’d never really thought about why.

Then, in 2021, I got the answer I was looking for, when I was diagnosed with ADHD. I realised that anime mattered to me because throughout my childhood, before my diagnosis, it’d been the characters I’d seen in anime, like Naruto Uzumaki, from Naruto, who’d taught me about myself. 

In Western media, delinquent characters always seemed to be the butt of the joke, the naughty boys that everyone laughed at, but nobody cared for. When an episode of The Simpsons ended, Bart’s life went back to normal. His actions had no lasting consequences, as each week everything started over again. But in anime, things were different. In long running shonen like Naruto, hyperactive and disruptive young boys, like me, were taken seriously. For all of Naruto’s bravado, the show’s early overarching storylines hinge on his isolation, and his desperation to overcome his flaws and be accepted by his peers – feelings I understood all too well.

Within a few months of my diagnosis, I was researching at the University of Leicester, working on a thesis titled, ADHD, Anime, and Writing Creative Non-Fiction. This consisted of a 40,000-word creative non-fiction collection, and a 30,000-word reflective commentary. The creative work used a hybrid form of memoir and essay to explore how my ADHD symptoms had affected my life, and how the stories and characters I’d found in anime had helped me to understand who I was, and where I fit in the world around me. My commentary looked at how experimenting with the structure and form of my essays led to me using more rigid, conventional writing structures, as a kind of "medicine" for my ADHD. 

Now that I am almost a year on from completing my studies, I look back at my PhD as a period of both creative and personal maturation. As I write this, I realise how glad I am that I persevered and insisted on writing about something that meant so much to me. At times, it was a painful and tiring process, but it was also joyous and revelatory, as I found that I learnt almost as much about myself, as I did about the craft of writing. I don’t know where my writing will take me next, but I do know that the my research journey was more rewarding than I had ever anticipated.

About the author
Mathew Lopez-Bland lives on a farm with his fiancé and their pet cat. When he’s not writing, he’s usually watching anime or playing football. He has a PhD in Creative Writing, and his short stories and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines.

Book Review Competition and Creative Writing Workshop for Bedford College Group

To celebrate the National Year of Reading 2026, the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester is holding a Book Review Competition and Creative Writing Workshop in conjunction with the Bedford College Group. The Book Review Competition is open to students at the Bedford College Group, and all entries will be considered for publication for publication on our popular book review blog Everybody's Reviewing. The workshop on "Non-Linear Narratives and Storytelling for Games" will run in Tresham College in Kettering on 16 October 2026, and is taught by Laura Besley and Jonathan Taylor. Details are below!

Angel T. Dionne, "Garden-Body"

 

Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist writer and professor at the University of Moncton’s Edmundston Campus. She obtained her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Pretoria in 2021. She is the author of Garden-Body (Radiant Press, forthcoming) and Bird Ornaments (Broken Tribe Press, 2025). She takes her coffee black and her fish tinned. Her website is here. 

About Garden-Body, by Angel T. Dionne

Lev’s Body grows only tangled weeds. His mother is part flora, part fauna; and his father is a bowl of ash. Through surrealist fragments of prose poetry, Garden-Body traces the invasive rhizomes of Lev’s life. 

Below, you can read two excerpts from the book. 

From Garden-Body

Birth

Lev is born without lips; a canvas of flesh stretches from cheek to cheek. A clean slate, his mother calls it, bird-pecking the place where his mouth should be. The doctors cut a thin line using a utility knife and expose rows of teeth already grown in, shimmering, adularescent moonstones. 

They slash him a bloodied smile and saddle-stitch the corners into an upturned crescent, so that even his cries look like laughter. 

A Collection of Eights

It’s worth mentioning now that Lev’s brother never really grew older than the age of eight. Benny slowly became his younger brother, then. He must have hatched from an eggplant, their mother says, whenever Benny spills his drink, or gets off his leash and bites a pedestrian, or births a small animal in the bathroom. She spikes her stinging-nettle tongue against him but always scoops the stillbirth from the toilet with her hands, pickles it, and writes Benny’s age on the jar in red marker. The naked deadborn rest in their salted brine, curling into themselves; swollen and decayed.

Every shelf in the house is crowded with dead things, all of them labeled with the number eight. 

"Adding Magic to Your Writing"

By Sally O’Reilly

Writing about magic means you can access the areas of your mind that you don’t normally use, freeing up imaginative ideas. But it only works if you impose constraints, and you need to decide how these are integrated into your story. 

Magic is multifaceted. In historical terms, high magic was practiced by scholars, and was often based on ancient texts and arcane knowledge. Whereas folk magic – including herbalism and fortune telling - was practised by women.

There are many ways of introducing magic into your story. You might create an entirely invented world, with its own rules, like Middle Earth or Earthsea. This is magic as fantasy. Related to this is the convention of a portal which leads to an invented world from this one.

Or you might make magic integral to the everyday world. For instance Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is set in a world similar to late-twentieth-century America, but which encompasses witchcraft. A similar approach is to use surreal magic in a narrative, in which everything is "off" and weirdness is normal. An example is Leonora Carrington’s "The Debutante," a short story in which a debutante morphs into a hyena.  

Currently, there is a vogue for retelling folk and fairy tales and giving them contemporary resonance. Angela Carter is one of the most influential writers in this field. Dark folk traditions are also inspiring stories in which nature is sentient or sinister, and the past haunts the present through the landscape. 

So what are the tactics that you might use? Spreading your net as wide as possible at the start is essential. It’s important to read /watch / absorb anything that interests you and has magical resonance. For instance, I just saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, in which a man plays chess with Death, a haunting, unforgettable image.  

You might also visit potentially inspiring places, again, keeping an open mind. Go to old cities, museums, remote places in nature. Writers like Alan Garner and C.S. Lewis were deeply inspired by the natural world. 

Another tactic is to try to rediscover your childish belief in the possibility of magic. Try writing down everything you can remember about a time in your childhood when you were scared, or left alone, or lost. Write down as much as you can about your feelings then, and try to recall as much detail as possible. Magic works best in fiction when it is interwoven with the everyday – think of Harry Potter and the Dursleys. 

Familiarise yourself with folk tales and myths. Grimms’ Fairy Tales is a good place to start, but there are fairy tales and fables from all over the world, varied and colourful, often with similar themes and tropes. Old stories can be repurposed time and time again. 

Using magic in a story means embedding it into the narrative. So the rules that apply to story-telling generally apply here. Traditionally, stories are about characters who want or lack something, who seek a goal, are blocked or challenged in getting to that goal, and who eventually change, and if the story has a happy ending, get what it was they wanted, or something different but slightly better. 

Don’t let the magic in your story solve all the problems your characters face. If you want your story to be engaging, then you need to limit the access your characters have to magical power. Otherwise, everything is too easy, there are no challenges, and therefore no conflict.

Make the rules of your fictional world clear to the reader from the beginning. Be consistent once you have established those rules. If the magic is treated as a skill that must be learned, the stakes are higher. Create barriers and challenges. Impose limitations and rules – for example – a spell can only be cast in specific circumstances. 

Your characters must earn their rewards. Their achievements will only feel satisfying to the reader if the characters had to work for it. 

All writers are dealing with magic to an extent – it’s a proxy for pure imagination. If you can make your readers believe in the magic in your story, you can make them believe that all the events are real. 

About the author
Writer Sally O’Reilly grew up in Stoke-on-Trent and now lives in Sheffield. En route, she’s spent time in Brixton, Brighton, and Barcelona. Her short stories have been published in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, and she has been shortlisted for the Cosmopolitan short story prize and the Ian St James Awards. Her historical novel Dark Aemilia (Myriad Editions/Picador US) was nominated for the Kirkus Prize. She has worked as a senior Creative Writing lecturer at the Open University and her journalism has been published in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and New Scientist. Her latest novel, Hagtale, is a reimagined origin story of Shakespeare's Macbeth and is shortlisted for the World of Books Sustainable Story Award 2026.

About Hagtale
A hagtale, a dark fable, a story told around winter’s fires and known to Shakespeare but never written down. Until now.

In eleventh-century Scotland, feral wolf-child Wulva is brought up by witches and then sent to live at a Scottish castle, where she falls under the spell of cruel, ambitious Lord Macbeth.

Three hundred years later, gentle Brother Rowan goes on a strange and perilous journey to a remote and ancient monastery to write a history of the Scottish king-line.

Misfits in their own time, seekers after truth, Wulva and Rowan are deeply connected despite the centuries that separate them.

Hagtale explores the power of stories lost and found, their transformative potential, and who gets to be the owner of the tale.

You can read more about Hagtale on the publisher's website here. 

Katie Daniels, "Stone"

 

Katie Daniels lives in Leicestershire and writes poetry and prose.  Her debut poetry collection, Catch, was published by Redbeck Press in 2007 and a pamphlet, The Geometry of Distance, by Mantle Community Arts in 2012. Her poems have appeared in publications including Magma, Iota, Obsessed with Pipework, and Other Poetry. Katie received an Arts Council grant for writing time in 2012, and another as part of the former Inky Fish poetry collective for their reading tour in 2006-07. Katie is self-employed and works as a charity governance professional. She plays a lot of Countdown, and is terrified of giraffes. 

Below, you can read Katie's poem "Stone." The poem has previously been published in Other Poetry and is taken from a projected full collection called Feathers in my Palm.

Stone

Moment of impact: stone/bone.
You're swaying slightly, then moving on,
walking the old road, hotheaded
 
where stone has broken you,
the back of your school shirt turning redbrown.
You’re fluid, offbeat, draining away,
 
thinking in stone’s subsurface glint -
some new cold language planting flags. 
This passive victory leaves you sure
 
that only stone could be this soft and wild:
slithering down to your new shoes,
smoothly embracing the furrows of your skull.

Robin Vaughan-Williams, "What Data Saw"

Robin Vaughan-Williams is a poet and producer based in London. His previous publications are The Manager (Happenstance Press) and How to Fix a Human (Sampson Low), and poems have appeared in magazines such as Acumen, Under the Radar, Long Poem Magazine, Dream Catcher, and Anthropocene. He did a PhD on the Bakhtin Circle which fuelled an ongoing interest in the voice as material, from open mics and performance-collage events to his practice in collaborative poetry improvisation. His work was highly commended for the Erbacce Prize 2026, and he has hosted live literature series in Sheffield, Nottingham, and Oxfordshire. His website is here. You can find him on Bluesky/Instagram @robinrvw.

About What Data Saw, by Robin Vaughan-Williams

In Robin Vaughan-Williams’s latest collection, Data is reimagined as a mythological being in the process of becoming. Unsure yet who or what she is, or the extent of her powers, Data attempts to blend in, understand, and communicate in a human world where she both does and does not belong. 

She appears on Secret Millionnaire, becomes the target of protest movements, witnesses human-on-human violence, and is used by people for their own ends. She needs to feed; but if everything is text, where can she find her mouth?

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

From What Data Saw

Data engulfs her mother

When Data yelled it made her mother go deaf in one ear.
When Data laughed a pod of dolphins dived for fish.
When Data gurgled cats patrolled the enclosure that kept her safe.
When Data opened her mouth there were already words waiting to fall from her breath.
When Data sucked at the breast it was hard.
She charged up on two teats thick with serum.
Her exhalations were sweet with electrolytes.

When Data was weaned she engulfed her mother.
She took her to a quiet place and lay there undisturbed for 9 months.
The mother-shape dissolved in her belly.
It became a fly.
It became a drinks dispenser.
It dropped cans into foxholes
that exploded when shook.
It pinpointed movement in the snow.
It entropied warm bodies.
The mother became the probability of an event.
A collision on a screen.
And Data moved through her mother in violent ways. 

Data: in a field

it is as if she is not there nowhere is Data
only data the stuff of her dreams things
she is made of always 'of' something
content but not contentment the feeling
of emptiness good at camouflage
and transcendental meditation stirring
the sugarcube into the universe to sweeten
the brew losing herself in an acid dance
in a field when the cows come home
she's still not there having it like a lost raver

Diana Janney, "The Zen Violinist"

 

Diana Janney is the author of the novels A Man of Understanding, the Runner-up in The People’s Book Prize, of which Frederick Forsyth was the Patron Emeritus, The Choice, and The Infinite Wisdom of Harriet Rose, which has been translated into many languages, produced as an audiobook by the BBC, and the film rights were sold. Formerly, Diana practised as a barrister in London after having qualified as a solicitor at a leading City of London international law firm. She gained two degrees in Philosophy at University College, London, where she received a First for her Master’s thesis on Kant and Hume, and three scholarships. Diana has received much acclaim for her writing, which combines her philosophical knowledge with her highly popular poetry and keen observation of human nature. Her new novel The Zen Violinist has already been described by Mark Williams, co-author of the worldwide bestselling book Mindfulness, as a masterpiece. It is published by Cogito on 1st October 2026. You can find out more about Diana’s writing on her website here.

About The Zen Violinist
Suki Koyama, a talented English violinist, grew up in Japan from the age of four. When she returns as an adult to London, her birthplace, to pursue a musical career, she takes with her many influences from her years in Japan – the violin, created by her luthier stepfather, classical music, poetry, writing, Zen. The two she values most are her violin playing and Zen nature, but on the brink of achieving her dream of success as a twenty-five-year-old soloist tragedy strikes and Suki fears she is losing both. A deepening relationship with enigmatic Rex Curtis intensifies her fear that her true nature is disappearing. How will Suki respond?

Suki tells her moving story in lyrical prose, like a concerto in three movements, to compose a thought-provoking, original reflection on a life guided by music and Zen practice. The story resounds with the beauty of a work of art, the wisdom of Zen, and the complexities of love.

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

From The Zen Violinist

finding suki

A violin who does not play soon loses her voice.
 
Each note played on her strings adds to her tone. Her quality is created by her player. Her player’s quality is created by her. When they play together, there is no separation. They are one. But they are also two.

There is a saying in Zen Buddhism: not one, not two.

Let me explain the best way I can, in Suki’s way.

When I play my violin, the violin and I are not two but one. Suki loses herself to the instrument as they create music together. There is no duality, no Suki and her violin – not two. Suki finds freedom, enlightenment through this experience in which there is a sense of no space and no time. 

Then the violin returns to her state of rest and Suki returns from her experience of enlightenment to a state of seeing the duality of Suki and violin as she saw it originally. That is, not one. 

Yet now when she sees the violin, it is with these new enlightened eyes. Not one, not two, but a third perspective. 
 
In a violin concerto, we often find themes in a first movement that repeat in a third final movement. They are the same themes, but they are different. They are now seen from a new perspective through the experience of the first and second movements. This experience gives the finale its altered, third perspective, even though the themes are like those at the beginning. In the end is the beginning, in the beginning is the end. Not one, not two, but a third perspective.
   

          but I forgot this. 
          concerto played without me.
          suki remembered. 

But this is not only about my violin and me. It is about something more. 

Tim Relf, "Not Even October"

 

Tim Relf, photo by MadMann photography

Tim Relf is a Leicestershire-based poet, novelist and journalist. His debut poetry collection, Not Even October, is out soon with Salt Publishing. His poems have been published in most of the UK’s leading poetry journals, including Poetry London, The Rialto, Stand, Under The Radar, Poetry Wales, The Dark Horse, Acumen, Banshee and Bad Lilies. He is a former poet-in-residence at Leicester Botanic Garden. His most recent novel, published by Penguin, was translated into more than 20 languages and turned into an audiobook starring Emilia Clarke and Charles Dance. You can find out more about his writing on his website here.  

About Not Even October, by Tim Relf
Not Even October is a collection about the easy-to-miss moments that shape lives. Moments in hotel rooms, petrol stations, cafes and vets. In suburban gardens and city parks. In small-town streets and country lanes. Evoking love lost and found, nights of excess, threads of friendship, the rip of grief and the flickering, beautiful absurdities of life in a digital, distracted age, the poems trace how we make sense of memory, mortality, place and home. Not Even October vaults from humour to heartache – then back again – in a breath, attuned both to the anxiety-inducing barrage of turbulent times and the calming comforts offered by the natural world. In this tender, relatable debut, Relf navigates contemporary Britain, finding everyday magic in everyday places, while asking readers: How do we hold on to what matters – and let go of what doesn’t?

You can read more about Not Even October on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a sample poem from the collection. 

From Not Even October

Windfall

It was going to be about how, if you sit in an orchard

in September, it surrounds you:

falling.

It was going to be about the soft drop of decades as you rest

between Ribston Pippins. But now I see – hear –

this poem isn’t about that, after all.

It’s about waiting for the word

for the sound apples make

landing:

the exact right word for the noise they make

as they hit the ground.

Anne Charnock, "Alston Moor"

Anne Charnock studied Environment Science and Fine Art, and her latest novel, Alston Moor, is a work of eco-fiction. She won the Arthur C. Clark Award 2018 for Dreams Before the Start of Time, and the British Science Fiction Association Award 2017 for her novella, The Enclave. Her debut novel, A Calculated Life, was a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award and the 2013 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award. Anne’s writing career began in science journalism, and her articles appeared in The Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune among others. Lancaster University recently awarded her an honorary DLitt for her novels "on key topics including near-future environmental collapse."

About Alston Moor, by Anne Charnock
In an epic novel set on the North Pennine Moors, Elizabeth has abandoned avalanche science to restore desolate peatlands. She treks in the footsteps of Isabel who, five centuries earlier, herds her cattle to remote summering grounds. 

Both are reeling from the overwhelming crises of their day. In 1548, Isabel and her father, together with the priest in this poorest of parishes, grapple with the chaos of the Protestant Reformation. Today, a grieving Elizabeth fights to save an invaluable ecosystem, one that is threatened by wilful fire-raising and arson.

The entwined stories are told through multiple voices creating a rich portrait of England’s most remote landscape. At its heart, this deeply moving novel interrogates how society confronts crisis whether through science, faith or superstition.

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

From Alston Moor

Christopher - May 2022

He scans across the moor, unsure exactly where they found the ruin. It stands a few stones high, he recalls, and he’ll know it when he sees it. From the ruin, they saw a single tree, so he heads towards the only one that’s visible from the path. And he smiles as he remembers that Abi could not believe a tree could survive out here through winter, seeing how blustery it felt even in May. If she were that tree, she said, she would pick up her roots and let the wind blow her somewhere warmer. 

He stumbles across the ruin, which squats in a slight hollow on the hillside, a few minutes scramble from the track. Clumps of reeds, which he does not remember from before, partly obscure what remains of the walls. Only now does he question what the hell he is doing here. Why come back? He hates himself for staying so angry. 

Isabel – May1548

Isabel knows the moment that changed her. Not the moment when she sat with a basket holding eight perfect eggs laid by their eight ordinary hens, when it dawned on her: these hens do the work and we take the profit. No, the moment that changed her occurred three years past at the Michaelmas fair in Hexham – the one time she travelled so far with her father. She stood before a stall selling cheeses. She stood transfixed by the sight of a single exotic fruit, an orange, on display – not for sale, mind. In that moment she gleaned that a world existed beyond these northern moors and valleys. A world where such a thing, this extraordinary orange, grows on trees or bushes or springs from the soil like cabbages, she knew not how. But she grasped that a place exists in the world where oranges are as ordinary as eggs.

Elizabeth – August 2022

When she switched her research from the Alps to working in peat bogs in the Pennines, she instantly drew looks of disappointment, bemusement, even from her sister. After the switch, Elizabeth received fewer invites to dinner. She supposed that her traveller’s tales became less riveting. No more derring-do. However, in some ways, Elizabeth feels that peat bogs suit her better, not so much in terms of the day-to-day research or the inherent dangers, but in terms of her as a person. She is introspective by nature – she accepts that – and she looks back on her days in the Alps as though she were accidentally caught up in a role bigger than her personality. In the movies, they would describe her as ‘cast against type’ as an avalanche scientist. Now she comes to think about it, her son is similarly cast against type. He is outgoing, extrovert, more like his father, and yet he works in insurance.

Mati Shemoelof, "Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin"

Mati Shemoelef, photo by Ali Ghandtschi

Mati Shemoelof is a Berlin-based writer, poet, curator and creative writing educator, originally from Haifa, Israel. He has published sixteen books of poetry, fiction, essays and drama in Israel and Germany, and his work moves between Hebrew, German, Arabic and English.

He is the co-founder of ANU – Jews and Arabs Writing in Berlin and the initiator of the Poetic Hafla, a literary and cultural series that brought together Hebrew, Arabic and German-speaking writers and artists in Berlin. He has also worked as a curator and editor and teaches Creative Writing in English, German and Hebrew.

His books published in Germany include the poetry collection Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin (AphorismA Verlag, 2019), Das kleine Boot in meiner Hand nenn ich Narbe (Parasitenpresse, 2023), and the novel Der Preis (PalmArtPress, 2025). His latest book, Fünfzehn Narben: Jüdisch-arabische Texte zu Politik und Poesie, a collection of essays and political and poetic texts, will be published by AphorismA Verlag in 2026. His first book written originally in German, Jiddische Sounds, Deutsche Wörter, will be published by Elif Verlag in 2027.

 

About Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin, by Mati Shemoelof, translated from Hebrew into German by Jan Kühne, Arabic translation by Nael Eltoukhy, Afterword by Jan Kühne

Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin brings together 40 poems from Mati Shemoelof’s Hebrew poetry books and presents them for the first time in German translation. The bilingual edition places the original Hebrew poems alongside Jan Kühne’s German translations, creating a dialogue between the language in which the poems were written and the language of Shemoelof’s new life in Berlin.

The three cities in the title mark three connected but very different worlds: Bagdad, the city from which Shemoelof’s Iraqi-Jewish family came; Haifa, where he was born and grew up; and Berlin, where he has lived since 2013 as a Hebrew-language writer.

The book brings these places together through questions of migration, memory, Mizrahi and Arab-Jewish identity, Jewish history, belonging and language. The poems move between family memories and contemporary political realities, between Israel and Germany, and between the experience of home and the experience of being a stranger.

Rather than presenting identity as something fixed, Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin shows it as something formed through movement. The three cities are not simply geographical locations. They become different layers of memory and belonging, carried by the poet from one language and country into another.

You can read more about Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin on the author's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Bagdad | Haifa | Berlin 

Luca Serra, "This Is Home"

Originally from Northern Italy, Luca Serra has been living in Scotland for thirteen years. From an early age, he has been interested in creative activities such as writing and painting. He has dedicated himself to writing for about fifteen years and has so far written four novels and various short stories in Italian and English. In January 2020 he received the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for Fiction. Since early 2021 he became a literary editor and mentor at Product Magazine, where he mentors emerging writers as part of the "Write Here, Write Now" programme. He currently teaches literacy and Creative Writing at HMP Glenochil.

Luca is particularly interested in contemporary social issues such as immigration, identity, and the divisive politics of today. Through his writing, he aims to explore the challenges and experiences that come with moving to new, unfamiliar places and how the characters establish their identity and purpose in those places. His characters are often misfits and minorities who pull out the remarkable and, sometimes, absurd in ordinary, day-to-day lives.

This Is Home, his debut English novel, was published by Leamington Books in January 2026.

About This Is Home, by Luca Serra 
This Is Home is a vivid, multivoiced story cycle that follows characters forging new lives far from where they began. Serra’s novel moves between London and Glasgow, tracing the emotional landscapes of migration, friendship, and the fragile search for belonging.

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

From This Is Home
A Friday stroll on Sauchiehall street is never just a stroll. Brunilda had got used to it. You might exchange a smile with perfect strangers, often locals, carrying amicable manners in their blood, well proud of the definition "Scotland’s friendliest city," well proud of being one of those "People Make Glasgow" people. Then, a block away, you might witness the first puke of the weekend, vile fruit of a 2pm football drinking session. 1.6 miles of buskers, beggars, reckless youths, hen parties, leaving parties, stag dos, today’s neds and punks, tomorrow’s artists. It’s home of immigrants young and old, hipsters, rebels, people with no tribe, everyone belonging to a huge, infinite family: the Glaswegians. It’s a street of no structure, a street of pure, erratic life. 

Brunilda often wondered what her role was on those 1.6 miles of walking stories. She watched and absorbed, taking in words, phrases and scenes to share with mum and grandma, one day, back in Brazil, home: the only place where she felt that unique, visceral sense of belonging. Brazil was everything she had been so far, her foundation and youth. Glasgow was the present, the moment, and although it was growing in her, it retained the shapes, lights and colours of an unfamiliar place. She didn’t see herself chatting away with a busker or consoling a kid who’s fallen off the bike: she felt like she’d be stepping on somebody else’s toes. As consequences of actions were unpredictable, she simply attended that daily march of pure, erratic life, rather than participated. She was a passive spectator.

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, "Skinship" (スキンシップ)

 

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana is author of two poetry collections: Sing Me Down from the Dark and Skinship, both published by Salt Publications. This year, she won the Frome Festival Crysse Morrison Poetry Prize, as well as Verve's February Poem of the Month competition, was placed third, by Mimi Khalvati, in the Kent and Sussex competition, and shortlisted for the Wolves Lit Festival competition. She is shortlisted for the 2026 Forwards Prize for Best Single Written Poem, for her poem, "Madam Gout," originally published by Magma.

Alexandra lived in Japan for ten years and has Master's degrees in Japanese Language and Culture and in Writing Poetry. She is based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and teaches for The Poetry School and The Poetry Business. Her most recent work is published or forthcoming in Pennine Platform, The North, Vervacious anthology (Verve Poetry Press), The Alchemy Spoon, and online in And Other Poems.

About Skinship, by Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana
Returning to Japan after a 15-year absence, our narrator is told she hasn’t changed. Yet everything has changed. Skinship examines our public and interior selves, the seen and the unseen, probing the complexities of relationships with lovers, kin, other women, and across cultures. These ideas are often explored through Japanese forms, including award-winning zuihitsu and haibun, and 2026 Forward Prize shortlisted "Madam Gout."

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

From Skinship

ふさわしくないもの

Unsuitable Things

           (after Sei Shōnagon) 

An obasan saying futota na to a foreigner: 

haven’t you put weight on? An old woman questioning 

the Japanese character, based on a competitive 

game of bridge. Pyramid tea bags that rip. On threads 

that twist around your index finger. A mother who twists 

words, shutting down conversation with her daughter: 

did you ring for a reason? A father telling his son he’s a quitter, 

because he leaves taekwondo. A son remonstrating 

with his mum, when she unplugs his gaming PC: 

are you a fucking moron? Chewing pellets of Rock Jaw gum, 

for better facial aesthetic. A father who won’t let him win 

arm wrestling. And a mother who sees a rival 

in her daughter, who, as I bend to kiss her cheek, 

says, I thought you were going to eat me.  

Michael M. Brownstein, "Paperbacks & Baguettes"

Michael M. Brownstein is a writer of fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in The Interstitial, Catharsis Chronicles, and The Lark, among other online journals. He is an editor for Scrittura and New Choices. Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us is his debut novella-in-flash. Michael lives with his family in Massachusetts and can usually be found making coffee and easing into the day.

About Paperbacks & Baguettes: Stories Between Us, by Michael M. Brownstein
Paperbacks & Baguettes is a novella-in-flash set in an independent bookstore café. Across forty interconnected stories, booksellers, baristas, managers, regulars, and passersby move through the rhythms of early mornings, busy afternoons, and late closings.

The stories focus on the small exchanges that gradually give the place its character: a mug left warm, a playlist shared across the counter, a scarf caught on a shelf, or a familiar customer acknowledged from across the room. Running quietly through the book is a developing relationship between a woman who frequents the store and the man behind the counter.

Together, the stories explore how attention, routine, and small acts of care can turn an ordinary place into somewhere people feel they belong.

Below, you can read one of the flashes from the book. 

From Paperbacks & Baguettes

The Folded Page

And the bell stammered once.

The aisle was narrow, just wide enough for two people to pass if neither lingered. Shelves leaned in, jackets pressed close when a hand pulled one forward. A cart bumped in the back and went quiet.

He bent the cover back, not much. A corner page still showed a fold.

From the other end, a woman slowed at the shelf. She pulled the same book from lower down, her copy stiff, his already worn. Their eyes moved between the two.

“You should take that one,” he said.

She turned it once in her hand. “Yours has history.”

He looked at the fold again. “Someone marked a place.”

She pressed her thumb there without opening it. “Maybe that’s where I’d stop too.”

A boy passed behind them, dragging his sleeve across the spines, the sound faint as paper brushing paper. Near the front, the register opened and shut, coins shifting in the drawer. The bell stammered once, then stopped.

The woman slid her copy under her arm, shifting her bag to make space. He kept his a moment longer, then pushed it back until the row leaned straight again.

When he looked up, she was already at the counter. His finger stayed on the folded page before he let go.

Light from the high window stretched over the jackets, then slipped away. The aisle was empty, except for the book pressed back into place.