June Wentland, "Factory of Light"

June Wentland would like to be able to say that she has a degree in Cosmology from Samarkand University and now divides her time between Milan and Vienna as a doyen of both dance and fashion but this would not be true. Married with a child by the time she was twenty, she’s an ordinary woman from Hull and now (via Manchester and Bristol) lives in Wiltshire. Her novel, Foolish Heroines (Valley Press), was published in 2021. June has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and her poems have featured widely in literary journals and magazines. Factory of Light (Fox and Star Books) is a limited edition poetry chapbook and her first collection of any kind.

About Factory of Light, by June Wentland
When I was recently asked, in a Poetry Society Stanza group meeting, what I would look for if I ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of judging a high-profile poetry competition, I said I would be hoping for a poem that created a  world which insinuated itself into my literary landscape. Poems which approached the unsayable or were of such clarity that they landed in the very heart of a feeling. A big and intimidating ask! 

I hope that the poems in Factory of Light go a tiny way towards part-achieving some of these aspirations, whether it’s by inviting the reader into a Daphne Du Maurier-loving garden or sharing a Eureka moment in an electric lighting factory when a flat piece of cardboard is conjured, at the flick of a wrist, into an object with volume. The chapbook has been put together with the belief that it’s wonderful to sometimes look beyond the scaffold of our tired perceptions and use words to rediscover the miraculous in everyday things.

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

From Factory of Light 

Reading Rebecca

Last night my garden dreamt of Manderley. 
I only have myself to blame – 
wandering below the green domes 
of Du Maurier’s prose.

No one told me how impressionable 
foliage is to literature in April – 
its cuticles absorbing words 
with frail spring sun.

The garden listens, sleeps and grows, 
advancing gothic-stemmed through dusk. 
Slugs creep through clumps of sub-plots, 
snails through sage, thyme and tortured love.

The neighbour’s gardens are more formal,
but if they were better-read
they too could dream of Manderley – 
seeding ideas outside the neat edges

of their flower beds. The walls of this house
are a breakwater for surging blooms – 
tides of hyacinths and hydrangeas, 
sagas of azalea and chard. 

Here, you can listen – not to the sea – 
but to the swish of couch grass 
where a woman might falter in a flimsy boat 
and perish on the waves of greenery.


Summer in the factory of light 

          The former Cascade Lighting factory, Radcliffe, Manchester

To the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes, 
we worked in teams and over the sunny weeks, 
grew close. Fingers filled with washers and threaded-rods, 
we disclosed intimacies – finnicky as circuit wiring – 
the positives and negatives of our lives. 
The other girls were all sixteen 
I was sage-like in my twentieth year 
and as we ate our Friday fish and chips 
I gave them all advice. 

In the packing bay I had my own epiphany. 
Never before had I considered 
the aspirations of cardboard. 
How flatness could flick to volume – pre-
configurations opening in a man’s quick hands – 
futures seeded in papery DNA. 
Panels like corrugated petals, blooming
or geometric creatures unfolding from a pupal state.
Their flaps fledged only for closing – never flying – 
their limits taped in place. 

All through those warm, slow-moving weeks
I thought of boxes. 
Their inclinations and their secret needs. 
I was just nineteen. 
I was a mum, a mortgage-holder, student and a wife – 
I was a sorcerer of cardboard. 
I was an oracle on love and life.

Carmella de Keyser, "Chasms"

Carmella de Keyser is a prize-winning British poet, known for explorations of identity, and the liminal spaces of human experience. Her writing spans both adult and children’s poetry. Founder of Harlow’s first Poetry Society Stanza, judge for the Harlow Poetry Open, she is committed to the democratisation of poetry and is an active figure in the grassroots UK poetry scene. De Keyser has five books published or forthcoming, from Hedgehog Press, Alien Buddha Press, Parlyaree Press and the Seventh Quarry Press. Her accolades include winning first prize for the Hedgehog Poetry Press Pamphlet competitions of 2024 and 2025 and achieving over 100 of her poems published in contemporary journals such as The Madrid Review, Hooghly Review, Dream Catcher: International Arts Journal and Dust Poetry Magazine amongst others. She has had her writing selected for podcasts and radio shows including for the BBC and has had the honour of having her poetry widely anthologised including by the major publishing house Macmillan. Her website is here. 

About Chasms, by Carmella de Keyser
Chasms is a reflective journey into intersections, an exploration of identities, trauma, conflict, justice and recalled memories of visiting the Balkans juxtaposed with London life in the 90’s. The word chasm originates from the Greek word "khasma" meaning yawning hollow or gulf. It can also be a profound divide, rift or impassable rupture in the earth between peoples, feelings or ideas. The poems within Chasms consider dissonance and identity across different settings, borders, edges, and of projective identifications of self and the other, yet they also invite in space for bridges to be built across these gulfs via joy, integration and reconciliation.

From Chasms

Reflections

Baba's face resembles railroad tracks that disappear into each other. 

Like an Escher woodcut. 

I can look at it for hours …

She has been perma-sketched by early dawns in the Balkan sun. 

Grooming her garden,

Twisting cucumbers away from their tender climbing. 

When she smiles, three more lines crack open - from each of the sides of her cinnamon eyes. 

As her lips downturn again, the motifs across her face are filled with wholesome flesh, plumped up by "baklava," "tulumba" and "revani." 

She has toiled for her whole life and her skin is all stories. 

My reflection has no novellas,

Or folk tales, 

Or kneeling in the early womb of the teeming soil, 

It’s paler than hers, has lived in colder climates, 

My cheeks are smooth, mirthless urbanised tombs,

Yet for a moment -

Drawn in, by her flare, and her gaze,

Her face warms mine.

 

No More Anniversaries

A pile for "her" and a pile for "him,"

Twenty years and it’s come to this.

The mahogany music stand – "his."

The mini pyramid ornaments – "hers."

The toaster – "his."

The porcelain chopsticks – "not sure."

Plates from his intrusive mother – "Who cares?!"

The origami child coiled in the corner – "theirs."

Some things can never be unshared.

Martin Goodman, "Swimming for England"

Born in Leicester, raised in Loughborough, and then let loose on the wider world, Martin Goodman settled down to become a writer at the age of twelve. It’s the one plan that stuck. Books evolve in his head while others come out in the world. Spanning fiction and nonfiction, sixteen titles take on spiritual journeys, reckonings with ancestral heritage, great lives, eco dramas, and gay themes. Some books win prizes, others win a few readers, and he figures all were worth the years that went into them. See his website here for more. 

About Swimming for England, by Martin Goodman
As a Leicester-based site you’ll probably get my brief pitch: Joe Orton on the Beach.

Faisal arrived in England in a boat of refugees from Calais. This time he’s swimming the Channel.

An English couple wait on the beach. They save lost boys – turning them into real men. Faisal will be their triumph, their first cross-Channel swimmer.

They plan to celebrate. Then out of nowhere Cameron appears. He’s Scottish but black, in smart clothes but with dirty hands. 

Is this another young man they can save? Or has he been digging around in their dark secrets? Now do they have to save themselves?

A chilling examination of English identity, toxic charity, and the violence that can erupt when we don’t get what we want.

You can read more about Swimming for England on the publisher's website here. Below, you can short a short extract from the novel. 

From Swimming for England

That bit about the sea swallowing him up, surely he didn’t mean… ?

Or is this him coming back?

It’s a young man for sure—but he’s not wearing white. He’s not wearing anything; well just a band of the briefest black swimming trunks. Black hair, brown skin, his feet stepping securely on pebbles like they were cushions of moss, walking with such poise, and as he steps free of the mist the daylight catches the wet sheen on him.

Eileen opens wide her arms. "Faisal!" she says.

"Hello Mum."

Faisal kisses Eileen on the cheeks. His lips are cold and he smells of the sea. Her waterproofs crinkle as she wraps her arms about his waist.

"You did it!" It’s hard to speak, her head pressed against the flesh of his chest, his heart beating fast, faster than hers, but she manages it. "Our boy’s a cross-Channel swimmer!"

He presses his hands on her shoulders and levers himself away. It’s not unkind. It’s just that Brian has stepped so close that Eileen’s squeezed off to the side.

"Dad." Faisal wraps his arms around Brian and they do a bear hug. 

Brian laughs that the boy is so wet and his oilies are working. "Go on," he says. "Shake yourself. Like a puppy. I said you would."

Faisal shakes himself. His black hair flicks wide from the wetness of his scalp and droplets rain in a silver shower all around him. Brian and Eileen laugh so Faisal shakes himself again.

There’s a roar. It comes from inside the mist, from the sea, a male bellow that swells like it was going somewhere, an anger set to explode, and then it just stops. They listen for more, and hear just the crash of a wave, and then another.

"What was that?" Faisal asks.

"That’ll be Cameron."

"He’s a young man," Eileen adds. "He’s got a good voice but he can’t swim. I think he’s thrown himself into the sea."

Jerry Gabriel, "Deserters"

Jerry Gabriel's first novel, Deserters, was published in May 2026 (Acre Books). He is the author of two collections of stories, The Let Go (Queen's Ferry Press, 2015) and Drowned Boy (Sarabande, 2010), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick, and was awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in One Story, Epoch, Fiction, The Missouri Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004), the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2011), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2016). He lives in Maryland with his family and teaches writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

About Deserters, by Jerry Gabriel
A clerical error has placed Robert Riley’s name on a list of men who have committed a particularly abhorrent form of desertion from the Union Army: bounty jumping. President Lincoln has said that such men—those who have cheated the system by accepting signing bonuses, or "bounties," for multiple enlistments—should be hanged.

It is fall 1864, and Riley has in fact deserted, though just the ordinary way, and is in flight toward the territories, having collected his two sons from their homestead in Southern Ohio, as well as an orphaned girl he met on his way across the Appalachians. As the four move across the lower Midwest, they are pursued by a surly private detective who seeks the reward for bringing Riley in. With the man eventually on their heels, they are forced to divert by train into Chicago, where Riley knows a place to hide. And it is here, in this cold and dangerous metropolis, in the weeks leading up to the 1864 election, that things begin to unravel for the party.

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

From Deserters

From Chapter 3

Robert Riley woke in a panic, blood drumming in his ears and throat. He saw Abigail holding infant Michael, shushing him to sleep. Abigail, he thought. And then: Michael.

He rose to his sweaty elbows, gripped by an urgency. Outside, the swampy August din of the Tidewater: deafening crickets and a dozen kinds of frogs. At least three of the men in the tent snored loudly.

He dressed and quietly gathered his bedroll and knapsack. Marcus Trask stirred from the rustling and opened an eye, catching Robert’s own for a beat, neither judgment nor envy fully in his gaze, but possibly some blend of those things. Robert shrugged back his own complicated feelings—he had eighteen months ahead of him still and knew the risk. He slipped out into the muggy night.

It was foggy and moonless. There was no trouble getting past the watch. Rarely did a runner get chased these days, anyway. He pointed himself far to the east of Richmond, the big Rebel guns blasting away miles behind him, ineffectual but for the disruption of sleep. He made a wide arc around the city, reversing the trip south months before, when, even before the arrival of the letters, the ill-feeling had first crept in and darkened his usually imperturbable mood. This hadn’t gone unnoticed.

"She ain’t paying the neighbors any visits, like in your head," one man joked at chow.

Robert barely knew him, and though he offered an inscrutable smile, he weighed whether or not braining the man would be worth the punishment. His fellow soldier, of course, could not know how freighted the reference to Robert’s dead wife was. But that’s why you didn’t speak of such things to strangers.

As they had inched south that summer, the hardship of the war and all its uncertainty was abetted by the sweltering days and the close nights. On the march, it had in fact been less Abigail on his mind than the boys. With time to think, he worried about them, and particularly about their future.

In moments of honesty, he admitted that Sean had already slipped his grasp. Even before Robert had joined the fight in February of ’63, the conflict between them had come out into the open. It was in part his own fault, he knew, for taking too severe an approach. But Sean’s zeal, his righteousness, had a hand, too. Sean already considered himself beyond Hollis—he was, he thought, a scientist—yet he was still a boy, making a boy’s many mistakes. Even so, with Sean, Robert at least understood the contours. 

Linda Anderson, "Against Falling"

 

Linda Anderson is Emeritus Professor of English at Newcastle University where she founded the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (2009) and the annual Newcastle Poetry Festival. She has written extensively about autobiography and feminist theory but more recently has published widely on Elizabeth Bishop, including the monograph, Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection (Edinburgh University Press 2013), and has co-edited a collection of essays on poetry archives, The Contemporary Poetry Archive: Essays and Interventions (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Originally from Scotland, she was an editor of Writing Women for many years, has worked to establish innovative poetry archives at Newcastle University, including the Bloodaxe Archive, and has published a poetry pamphlet, Greenhouse, with Mariscat Press, 2013. She is currently Chair of Bloodaxe Books. Her first poetry collection, The Station Before (2020) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize.

About Against Falling, by Linda Anderson 

At the heart of Linda Anderson’s second collection is an exploration of time and of ageing. Time is pressing, urgent, in relation to both the individual and the planet. However, underneath, there is also something unfinished, whether that be in relation to memory’s ability to revise the past and take on different shapes and meanings, or in relation to writing itself which has a materiality which links it to the body of the writer. The collection contains an interrogation of the poet’s notebooks where chance and randomness have an important part to play, forging surprising links, and directing attention to the surrounding bloom of uncertainty, the ‘diaphanous, unwritten poem’ that lurks behind any finished poem. The fragility of the body also undermines certainty, and while much of the collection draws on visual imagery, derived particularly from the natural world, the loss of sight is folded into acts of careful observation, making seeing itself both more problematic and more precious.

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

From Against Falling

Near 

          1.Blanchland 

          For A.S.

Pause in this proximity, 

in the flare of beech trees 

alight with green, 

the canopy of birdsong. 

Now is what we live over and over.

 

Even in this place that feels ancient, 

where our memories come back to us, 

something new is forming, 

an indentation in the surface of things 

a shape making itself felt. 

Listen and it’s as if there’s a note 

almost too high to hear, the merest touch on the strings, 

and we don’t know if we’re imagining it, 

fence and blossom and light 

pierced by singing. 

It takes only this hair-crack in time, 

mid-stride, mid-sentence, 

a bated breath, 

for all the winged creatures suddenly 

to rise up and fly through us.

Dustman 

           (After the painting by Stanley Spencer) 

Everything depends on dust, 

the particles of everything. 

Look closer it tells us. Never 

despise the slightest thing. 

Time is a drift of heaven-knows-what, 

silted into memory. 

Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, 

bone-dust, crockery-dust. 

The dust he noted in the long bare studio, 

warmed by the radiant stove. 

Or the dustmen clattering the bins 

in the street, a paean of bells. 

Life evicts us from our homes, 

yet live we must. 

Fustily, he will resurrect it all. 

The miracle of cabbages 

and teapots and skin. 

Dust to dust 

crowded with yearning 

for how it begins.

Catherine Tudish, "A Thousand Souls: A Novel in Stories"

 

Catherine Tudish is the author of the novel American Cream and the story collection Tenney’s Landing. She has taught writing and literature at Harvard University, Dartmouth College, and the Bread Loaf School of English. She now lives in a village in central Vermont, where she teaches a community writing workshop at the local library.

About A Thousand Souls: A Novel in Stories, by Catherine Tudish
The fourteen stories of A Thousand Souls interweave the lives of three generations in the remote village of Neptune, Vermont, as they inevitably touch the outside world. Even as their loyalties and traditions are tested through times of loss, betrayal, and discovery, these characters embody an abiding connection to place. Sharply observed, wry, and deeply tender, these stories resonate with both the intricacy and cost of interconnection as the years pass, and ordinary lives take unexpected turns.

You can read more about A Thousand Souls on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the title story. 

From A Thousand Souls

My name is Stewart Prime. I drive a rural mail route, which gives me a lot of time to think. Lately I’ve been thinking about how a tiny thing—a worn-out gear, say, or a word misspoken—can change a person’s life forever. It’s hardly a new topic with me. The turning point of my life came early, not long after my sixth birthday, when my mother and father and older brother Henry died in the collapse of a carnival Ferris wheel. They happened to be in the seat at the very top when things went wrong. Others were injured, but no one except my parents and my brother was killed. I was in the hospital at the time, recovering from a tonsillectomy. Henry had promised to win a prize for me at the pitching booth and bring it to my hospital room. I don’t know if he won a prize or not. They might have gone on the Ferris wheel before playing any of the games. 

*

For some time after the accident, I met my family in a dream. I would walk outside in the early morning to find my mother and father and brother waiting for me on the cool grass. The sun would be rising behind them, and in that gauzy light I could see they were angels with beautiful wings, like the angels in the church window. As I got closer to them, they would take off their wings and lay them gently on the ground.

“Why are you taking off your wings?” I would ask, fascinated by the pearly whiteness of the feathers.

“It’s the only way we can be with you, sweetheart,” my mother would say.

“We don’t mind,” Henry would add, casting a wistful glance behind him.

When my father smiled at me and opened his arms, I would know it was true. They had come back to me. I couldn’t help it, I cried for joy.

*

I must have been about nine when I understood, even while I was dreaming, that the angels were not real. My family was never coming back. 

Suyin Du Bois, "Eating Air"

 

Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London with her South African husband. Her poems have been published in Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing, 2023) and Malaysian Places and Spaces (Maya Press, 2024), amongst others. She is a member of the Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective 2024/25. When not obsessing over word choice, Suyin spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff. Eating Air is her debut pamphlet.

About Eating Air, by Suyin Du Bois
Steam rises from bowls of noodle soup, tender steaks are seared in butter, sand-roasted chestnuts are shared from a paper bag. Eating Air – the debut pamphlet from Suyin Du Bois – is a mouth-watering collection of poems about food, belonging and connection. 

Charting a journey across cuisines and continents, these poems carve into the author’s dual Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage and food's enduring role in our cultural, familial and personal histories. 

From the low stools of Penang’s kopitiams to the bright lights of London's Chinatown, Eating Air is a love song to food and a poignant catalogue of its profound capacity to serve up memory, language, and longing.

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

From Eating Air

Ode to Kaya

 

Egg jam first on my young tongue: palm sugar 

sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred 

toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang 

sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you

in that double boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, 

twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled

amongst swimming costumes and sundresses – rituals

to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home

to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, 

our knives more sparing after each spread. 

After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles 

gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya.

Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire

of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese 

mushrooms, our longing for Nyonya flavours.

By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown 

up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours.

Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed

into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked

regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.

You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir

like her until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage.

I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue 

your clotted grainy sweetness.

 

Cut Scenes

Dad fusses with his leather school bag / before sitting down to breakfast / by the coal-fired stove / in a 1920s maison de ville I’ve visited from the pavement / my grand-père / who I know from Agfa Billy snaps of walking holidays in the Ardennes / Sunday best studio portraits / has sizzled him a small steak / in a lump of butter / crisped at the edges / deep juicy red in the centre / fried bread on the side / the best way he knows / to sustain his son / on the bundled walk across the tram tracks to school / to protect him / against its respected priests / the wooden blackboard erasers they aim at boys’ heads

 

Dad orders steak in a restaurant / blue / walking to the table / by the excuse-me method of cooking / one part joke / three parts recipe / waiters don’t always get it / my held breath / a kind of grace / I watch for his knife to deliver / deep juicy red / not pink / worse grey / how else / can he see his father again / only when I know / it won’t be sent back / I slice my own / reveal / the fibres that make us 

Professional Writing and Publishing on Creative Writing at Leicester

Over the years, we've published numerous articles on professional writing, publishing and other aspects of "employability" in relation to Creative Writing. So we thought it might be a good idea to bring some of these together. 

We embed professional writing skills at all levels (undergraduate and postgraduate) in our Creative Writing courses at Leicester. We believe it's a fundamental (and also fascinatingly varied) part of the subject. 

Below, you can find links to many of the features we've run on aspects of the professional writing world over the last few years. Some of these are general, some written by students and graduates, some by professionals beyond the university. Just click on the links to read more. 

Books by Students on Creative Writing at Leicester

Resources and Opportunities in the Media 

Some Useful Online Resources for Creative Writers 

The MA in Creative Writing: What You Can Expect

How Creative Writing Skills Can Make You A Better Copywriter, by Kristina Adams 

What Ghostwriting Taught Me, by Charis Buckingham

Five Years of Publishing Beyond the Mainstream: On Setting Up and Running Renard Press, by Will Dady

Pitch Perfect: Make Money from Your Writing, by Simon Elson

The Author as Promoter: A How-to Guide, by Charlie Hill

On Running a Literary Festival, by Charlie Hill

Reflecting: The Lessons I've Learned as a Writer, by Jenny Kane

Small Press Publishing: The Dos and Don'ts, by Isabelle Kenyon

In Conversation with Literary Journals, ed. Isabelle Kenyon and Charley Barnes

Our Future Storytellers: A Creative and Critical Writing Course, by Amirah Mohiddin

Writing for Games: Theory & Practice, by Hannah Nicklin

Multiple Middles: Storytelling in Games, by Hannah Nicklin

So You Want to Self-Publish? by Alicia Saccoh

Is An Internship for You? by Lisa Smalley

My Work Experience at Shoestring Press, by Sonia Tailor 

On Applications and Employability, by Jonathan Taylor

Creative and Critical Digressions: On the Creative Writing PhD, by Paul Taylor-McCartney

Red Flags and Green Flags in Publishing, by Anna Vaught

Do Too Many Cooks Spoil the Draft? Some Reflections On Amateur Hour's Second Zine and Group Feedback, by Nina Walker

Work Experience, Copywriting and Journalism, by India Wentworth

The Civil Service Fast Stream: Career Opportunities, by Gregory Wilson

Hilda Hoy (金邦琳), "Mother Tongue"

Hilda Hoy (金邦琳) is a Taiwanese Canadian writer, editor, and translator based in Berlin. In addition to working as a reporter for the Toronto Star and the Prague Post, she has published narrative non-fiction in Roads & Kingdoms, Slate, BBC Travel, and Narratively, as well as a travel guidebook titled The HUNT: Berlin. 

She is currently working on an essay collection exploring the entanglement of identity and language in individuals with backgrounds of migration or displacement. In December 2024, this project saw Hilda serve as writer in residence at the Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei. The diaspora experience and examinations of identity are central themes in her writing.

About Mother Tongue, by Hilda Hoy
In Mother Tongue, Hilda Hoy explores the manifold capacities of language: to shape one’s sense of self, to bring together, to hold apart.

Raised in Taiwan by her Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, bilingual from the beginning, Hoy explores her experience of growing up with otherness, and traces how English became her dominant tongue. After many years living in Canada and Europe, her Chinese-speaking self packed into a box and sealed shut, the repercussions of her loss of Mandarin are thrown into sharp focus when her mother is diagnosed with dementia, and begins losing the ability to speak.

A tender exploration of grief and reconnection, of belonging and self, Mother Tongue is the story of a journey to locate one’s voice between hybrid places.

You can read more about Mother Tongue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Mother Tongue
When my father was at work and my mother had errands to run, we sometimes went into the city by taxi. These journeys followed a pattern. Crooning ballads on the radio, the smell of cigarette smoke and perm solution. The crinkle-haired driver examining us in the rearview mirror, brow scrunched in puzzlement. Zhèxiē háizǐ shì shuí de? Whose children are these?

Wǒ de, my mother would reply. They’re mine.

Crooning ballad on the radio. Cigarette smoke. Exclamations of disbelief. How could a woman like her have such white children? They’re mine, my mother would repeat, her jaw tensing ever so slightly. Or: You’re right, I found them on the street. The driver would laugh, but she did not. I understood every word but said nothing, watching the world go by through glass. It seemed pointless to speak when my face spoke for me, telling the only home I’d ever known that I did not belong.

Annabelle Slator, "Risky Business"

Annabelle Slator grew up writing stories in the depths of the British countryside. After achieving a degree in Creative Writing, she spent most of her twenties working with brands and start-ups in London and New York. Nowadays, if she isn’t spending time writing, you can almost always find her obsessing over niche internet drama, practising her fencing parry or mooching around vintage fairs and flea markets with her husband and two dachshunds, Gruffalo and Gryffin. The Launch Date is Annabelle’s debut novel, inspired by her time working in the wild world of dating apps. Risky Business is her second novel, inspired by her experiences working in the tech and start-up industry.

 

About Risky Business, by Annabelle Slator
Tech founder Jess Cole, desperate to keep her start-up afloat, is forced to pose as her brother’s assistant during a tech competition, hoping a male-led company will be taken more seriously, only to find her secret identity "Violet" compromised when she has a hot one-night stand with the head of the competition’s assistant.

You can read more about Risky Business on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the novel. 

From Risky Business

"You made it." His low timbre coats the seething anxiety flowing through my veins.

I turn my chair on the swivel, laying my phone face down on the bar and cocking my head to the side, "Disappointed?"

Oliver stifles a smile, chin lowering to meet my eyeline. "Far from it, I was hoping you'd show." His fingers pinch the sides of a sweating glass.

I balance on an elbow, glancing at the drink. "So you can throw a beer on me and finish the job?"

"How about I just buy you one instead?" He gestures to the empty seat beside me, and I nod, rolling my eyes and crossing my legs. He doesn't hold himself with the same buzzing energy most in this room do, like they are desperate to impress their bosses and one another. He has a commanding presence, a mixture of laid-back and authoritative that I can't quite get a handle on.

He settles into the chair and leans his forearms onto the bar, his shoulder muscles tensing under the crisp white shirt. I feel a quiet thrill in his company, like an echo of adrenaline.

His chin shifts to me, the tea lights in red jars on the bar casting his cheekbones in a devilish glow. "What made you decide to come?"

I shrug, glancing awkwardly from him to the shelf of bottles with brightly coloured Italian labels. "I was having a mental breakdown in the area so thought it would be rude not to."

He huffs a laugh, hazel eyes twinkling. "Bad day?" The words roll off his tongue so smoothly that I imagine he was a cigarette-lighting bartender in another life.

I contemplate lying, but something about him is making me want to tell him the truth, to drop the pretences. I lean my elbow on the bar, resting my chin in my palm. "Bad year."

He whistles, almost impressed. "We better make it a double then." He gestures to the bartender with two fingers.

I shake my head, the background noise returning to the room with a pop as I come out of the minor trance. "You don't need to buy me a drink."

He shoots me a fake-appalled look. "Listen, I'm just trying my best to charm you over from the actively disliking me camp to a more neutral zone. I owe you at least one." He holds up a shiny black credit card. "Besides, this is my boss's card." He hits me with another winning smile.

"Oh, well, in that case, I'll have a Negroni." I sit back, relaxing into the chair. "How come your boss lets you run amok with his credit card?"

He taps the short edge of the plastic on the wooden bar. "Because I'm the only one who knows how to get his coffee order right, and knowledge is power."

"The keys to the caffeinated castle," I add with a nod.

He points at me with the shiny card. "Exactly."

"If only you could deliver them in one piece," I add, brow arched.

"Well, then I'd be running the whole company, and nobody wants that."

Joanna Nadin, "When the World Ends"

 

Dr Joanna Nadin is a former broadcast journalist and special adviser to the Prime Minister. Since leaving politics she’s written more than 100 books for adults and children, including the Sunday Times bestselling Worst Class in the World series, the Flying Fergus series with Sir Chris Hoy, and the acclaimed Joe All Alone, which is now a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. She’s been nominated five times for the Carnegie Medal for Writing, and shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and twice for the Lollies. She’s an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at University of Bristol.

About When the World Ends, by Joanna Nadin
When the unthinkable happens to the planet, two ragtag groups of kids on opposite sides of England beat the odds and escape death. But they soon realise that the only way to be truly safe is to seek a place they've only heard about in stories. As their treacherous journeys unfold, can they help each other survive - even when the world is ending around them? 

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

From When the World Ends

Be Prepared

The government said to 
stop using plastic and 
time all our showers and 
turn off the heating, but
it wasn’t enough. 

The government gave  
instructions to comfort us. 
To make us feel we stood 
a chance, when we haven’t got 
a single hope. 

 
Flood

You think it will be silent when it rises.
But it comes in a 
thunder and rush,
a clatter and clanking of 
cars smashing on lamp-posts and
the sides of fried chicken shops,
of things in the water that 
should be on land. 
And over it all,
car alarms and fire sirens, 
and the screaming of people
who know they are as good as
dead. 

 
Guess What

Everyone is an expert on
what will happen next. 

The navy, says Mrs Witter, who’s seen 
Chinooks on the TV so she 
knows what she’s talking about. 
The navy will take us to Culdrose or
Yeovil.

Armageddon Terry reckons the water will
sink by midweek and 
we’ll be able to rescue ourselves – 
our own handsome princes. 

The tourists only care whether
they’ll get a refund and when
they can post their one-star review and if
any trains will leave from Par or Liskeard. 

And all the while, me and Roshan play cards 
and try to guess who would win in a fight between
a dinosaur and Armageddon Terry,
while I try not to wonder where my mum is 
or if she is at all.

Anna Vaught, "All the Days I Did Not Live"

 

Dr Anna Vaught is an English and Creative Writing teacher and mentor, occasional lecturer, campaigner - and prolific author. Find her everywhere on social media as "Bookwormvaught." Links and further information here. 

About All the Days I Did Not Live, by Anna Vaught
After the death of her steady, constraining husband, Catherine discovers that grief can be a liberation. With her adult children appalled by her sudden transformations, and a strangely familiar presence in the house urging her on, she begins to test the boundaries of who she might become. A call arrives on her newly purchased phone – a widower, Alec, still dialling the number once owned by his dead wife. What follows is a transgressive, intoxicating relationship built on longing, lies and the hunger to feel alive. All the Days I Did Not Live is a haunting exploration of loneliness, taboo and the dangerous, but delicious, magic of reinvention – where freedom comes at a cost and even the ghosts refuse to stay quiet …

You can read more about All the Days I Did Not Live on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of the novella. 

From All the Days I Did Not Live

1.

Yesterday I dreamed of that taste again. I dreamed of a deferential early summer. A kind breeze. I had taken the unripe and forbidden pear from the grass in the orchard. For a few moments, I sat cradling it as he watched. He had a camera and a scowl. In my dream, as on that hot day in the orchard, I lifted my chin and scowled back: it was the first time. Then I held the pear up, while his eyes said Do not dare; I held it up still further, before plunging it down to my mouth, biting into it lasciviously, though indeed it was unripe. 

As I said, it was the first time – the first time I had defied him – and in many dreams through my girlhood and all the way to middle age, and now, that dream comes back. I remember the sweet scratch of summer grass, wet, ardent on my bare feet. I am a teenage girl, shoulders back, the tart juice dripping down my chin. It is slightly obscene, and that is how I meant it. He does not move, and I think now, I can do anything. I feel, in defiance, that I am fully alive.

To this day a pear must be unripe, but yielding enough, and there must be juice, not only moisture. I must catch it at the right moment, if I can.

Yesterday I dreamed of that taste again. Of that time. Of my one invincible summer.

I dreamed at night, and then again when I awoke. Before I went to sleep, I thought I heard a drumming sound. I am used to that sound, I said to myself. Stress, anxiety: the blood pulsing and whooshing in your ears, then an irritation of tap, tap in your head, pinprick in your eye and a band snapping at your temples. 

But you see, I was wrong about that. And right before I drifted, with thoughts of that pear, the drumming sound was in the walls and under my bed. 

I am alive. I am fully alive.

Gerri Kimber, "Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life"

Dr Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is the author or co-editor of over 40 books and has contributed chapters to many other volumes. She has published widely in numerous journals, notably for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was President of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–2020). Gerri has made a number of media appearances on national radio and television in both the UK and New Zealand and has been invited as a keynote speaker all over the world. In 2014 she was runner-up for the title of UK New Zealander of the Year for her services to New Zealand culture. Her new biography Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life has just been published by Reaktion Books.

About Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, by Gerri Kimber 
Katherine Mansfield has not been short of biographers since her death in 1923, but this latest biography offers a new focus, where the complicated bond between Mansfield and her husband, John Middleton Murry, is fully revealed for the first time, demonstrating how it was far from the loving relationship superficially portrayed in most of their letters, when Mansfield tended to obscure what she was actually feeling. As time went by, and their literary fame grew, both she and Murry became more acutely aware of posterity and publication – as evidenced in Murry’s bowdlerised early editions of Mansfield’s letters. In addition, there was another complication in their relationship, overlooked by most biographers until now, and that is the covert, long-term bond between Mansfield and the editor of the New Age, A. R. Orage, which, as this biography reveals, truly came to define her life – both artistic and personal – and her death.

In transcribing Mansfield’s letters for the Edinburgh edition, I had already come to a deep-seated understanding of the amount of dissembling in her missives to Murry: outwardly loving, she remained inwardly tormented by the fact that there never was a couple less suited to each other than they were, as Leonard Woolf so astutely recognised. At no point in their relationship did Murry ever truly step up to the mark. But one man nearly always did – Orage. Sadly, Orage famously never kept letters. We only have one from Mansfield to him still in existence, plus the short draft of one more. Nevertheless, my suspicions were confirmed when I made contact with Orage scholar John Wood, who had written extensive notes on the subject but never published them, and who so generously allowed me to make use of his research for this biography. 

What we uncovered together was a deep-seated relationship, both sexual and intellectual, which supported Mansfield throughout her adult life, and which left regrets on both sides – especially the realisation that because of their personal circumstances, neither of them were able to fully explore that relationship. But if any proof were needed of Orage’s significance for Mansfield, they need only look to the last year of her life, and especially those precious few weeks spent together at Gurdjieff’s "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" in Fontainebleau-Avon. This biography traces that relationship, from its earliest beginnings, through frustrations and outward aloofness, to various rapprochements and covert liaisons, finally wending its complicated and thwarted route to its ultimate conclusion, in a way that has never been revealed before. In uncovering the true extent of Orage’s influence on Mansfield, and not just in 1910–11 as was previously thought, it will be impossible for future biographers to ignore what was possibly the most significant relationship of her entire life. 

You can read more about Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography. 

From Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life
The year 1919 marked the beginning of the last four years of Mansfield’s life (though she didn’t know it) – the most successful in terms of her professional career, the most harrowing in terms of her health and the most complex in terms of her relationship with Murry. The sheer number of letters sent attests to the long periods the couple were to spend apart during these last tumultuous years, as the two things Mansfield longed for more than anything (apart from good health) – a stable home life and her man by her side – drifted continually out of reach. Indeed, they were the things she most envied about her literary friend and rival, Virginia. In a letter to Virginia in April 1919 she had written, "A husband, a home, a great many books & a passion for writing – are very nice things to possess all at once." But later that year she would write to Murry, "That's one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together," and ten days later, 2How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call." Just two months later, remembering her utter distress a few weeks previously, she wrote again to Murry: "I used to feel like Virginia but she had Leonard. I had no-one." And it is just this sense of isolation – a lone warrior battling ill-health – together with a complicated, frequently disappointing marriage, that are the overriding features of the remainder of this biography.

A. J. Ashworth, "Maybe the Birds"

A. ‎J. Ashworth is the author of the short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here, which won The Scott Prize and was shortlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. The Times Literary Supplement said that her work "displays impressive versatility" and that her stories "do not progress so much as accrue, collecting incidental detail that enriches the scenarios without pointing towards their resolution." She is the editor of Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, which was her own idea to raise funds for The Brontë Birthplace Trust. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University and works as an associate editor of the journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Maybe the Birds is her second collection and features "Leather" which was selected for Best British Short Stories.

About Maybe the Birds, by A. J. Ashworth
After the apocalypse destroys most life on Earth, a woman makes artificial bird voiceboxes to try to keep birdsong alive. A young female vampire uses her knowledge of mirrors to save her village from the man who turned her. A woman haunted by her past feels that the robins she has always loved are no longer her friends. These fourteen stories, largely speculative in nature, consider what happens when the world is no longer as it used to be – whether in the postapocalyptic future, the paleolithic past or the dark north of the present. The collection is interested in love and loss, families and foes, as well as moments of disconnection and connection. All are interested in what it means to be alive in very difficult times.

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

From Maybe the Birds

From the title story "Maybe the Birds"

I watch the dog. The dog watches something through the patio doors to the backyard. Every now and then his head tilts to one side in the way it does when I talk to him or sing to him. Although there is no sound that would make him do that now. Not that I can make out anyway. But dogs have better hearing, don’t they? They hear things no human ear is capable of detecting.

Like dog whistles.

The low growl of thunder from five miles away.

A million voices screaming from the other side of the world.

Maybe the birds are singing but I just can’t hear them. Maybe there is someone out there shuffling about. Maybe, maybe ... But this is all just wishful thinking – the birds, someone being out there. It’s the way your mind gets in the quiet. He’s probably just got his eyes on all the brown leaves in the yard and wondering why they’re there. "Why all these brown leaves in the spring, Ma?" I imagine him asking in the human voice I have given to him. But I haven’t got any answers. None that he would understand anyway. And so I keep quiet, and just carry on watching as he tilts his head the other way. Not once looking at me. Eyes full on whatever has got his attention through the grey dust coating the glass on the patio door. The little dots of his pupils as black as the night used to be.