Congratulations to UoL PhD Creative Writing graduate Hannah Stevens, whose new short story collection, On the Bodies of Strangers, has just been published!
Hannah Stevens is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. In Their Absence, her debut collection of stories was published by the Stretto imprint of Roman Books and was translated into Bulgarian by Ana Pipeva for Altera Press.
Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies including The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories and Unthology 10: Fight or Flight. She is widely published in literary journals and magazines globally including Archer Magazine (Australia), Loose Lips (Canada), Necessary Fiction (USA), Litro Magazine, Idle Ink, Losslit, Fictive Dream and TSS Publishing (all UK).
She is currently working on her third collection of stories inspired by her time living and working in Taiwan. She has undertaken writing residencies in Yangon, Myanmar, The Literature and Translation House in Sofia, Bulgaria and the Taiwan Literature Base, Taipei.
Hannah is also an editor and creative events producer and has worked around the world on projects using writing and storytelling as tools for positive social change, partnering with the BBC, the British Embassy, Greenpeace and many others. Her website is here.
About On the Bodies of Strangers, by Hannah Stevens
Shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize 2022. A collection of short stories linked by the theme of tattoos.
Our lives, our experiences and the people we encounter leave behind indelible marks. On the Bodies of Strangers explores marked lives and marked flesh. The stories in this collection are linked by a single thread: the tattoos of their protagonists, traces of experiences and meaning etched onto their skin.
These are stories about the chaos of ordinary lives, about people who are flawed, complicated, but always deeply human. From domestic abuse to unexpected friendship, mixing horror and hope, intimacies and lies, On the Bodies of Strangers explores the many ways we mark each other and ourselves as we deal with the complexities of human behaviour.
You can read more about On the Bodies of Strangers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.
From On the Bodies of Strangers
Extract from Stick and Poke
The sun is higher now and the air is hazy with dust. The factory is in full sun, and so they’ve had to move for some shade. They sit beneath a tree across the wasteland close by.
Angel opens her bag and pulls out an old towel. She lays it carefully onto the floor, smoothing out the rucks as best she can on the uneven ground. Alma watches, nods her head in approval.
"It’s getting real now," she says. Angel doesn’t speak, takes out a plastic pouch filled with a handful of sewing needles. Next she brings out a pencil, a spool of thread, and then a tiny pot of blank ink.
"This is everything," says Angel, sitting up and straightening her back.
"So, how does it work, then?" Alma asks. She shifts slightly, trying to get comfortable on the hard ground.
"Well," says Angel. "You dip the needle into ink and then poke it into the skin. Like, over and over again."
"Yeah, even I got that," says Alma. "So the tattoo is made out of dots, not lines?"
"Yes," says Angel. "I’ll be poking dots, not drawing lines, and I’ll have to go over it a few times. It’s going to hurt." She stops talking and looks at Alma.
"It’s fine," says Alma. "I can handle it." She sniffs, avoids looking directly back at Angel.
"What design do you want?" Angel asks.
Alma doesn’t want to say, somehow. "I thought you were supposed to be the artist," she shrugs.
"I wouldn’t say that," says Angel. "Anyway, you should choose. It’s your body."
A woman with two kids appears on the canal towpath. She is carrying shopping bags in each hand. They look heavy, and her shoulders sag. Alma can see the woman’s face is red, set hard against the distance she’s got to walk home. The two boys trail behind her, struggling in the lunchtime heat. Alma wonders who they are, who they’ll become, if they’d disappear eventually too. Just like her dad.
"Maybe a moon," says Alma finally. She remembers that time when her dad was home. Just for a short while. How he showed her the moon from her bedroom window, said that whenever she saw it, she should think of him, how he loved her. It was the only time she’d heard him say that he loved anyone. She remembers the moon’s white glow, the curl of it against the dark, empty sky.
