Showing posts with label University of Gloucestershire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of Gloucestershire. Show all posts

Monday, 28 July 2025

A. S. Andrejevic, "Under the Same Moon"

 

A. S. Andrejevic is a Serbian-British writer whose work has appeared in The Lampeter Review, Storgy, The Wrong Quarterly, Scrutiny Journal, The Dawntreader, Scary Mommy, Literary Mama, Brain, Child, and other magazines. Her plays have been longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize, shortlisted by Bristol Old Vic, and supported by Arts Council England. She’s represented by Lorella Belli Literary Agency, and her debut novel, Under the Same Moon, is due out with APS Books in September 2025. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire, where she encourages her students to think big, write with honesty, and stay true to their voice.




About Under the Same Moon, by A. S. Andrejevic
Under the Same Moon is a suspenseful story about Serbian emigrants in London during the 1990s wars, and how their past continues to haunt them, even decades later.

Jelena has built a very English life - now known as Helen, she relishes her elegant home in north London, her doting husband and two children, and the complete erasure of the country she once fled. But when a man she hasn’t seen in sixteen years shows up at her door, everything she’s built begins to unravel. 

As old loyalties resurface and buried memories threaten to destroy her carefully constructed world, Jelena must finally face the truth about what happened all those years ago. Did she betray the love of her life - or save herself from a dangerous man?

Told across two timelines and set in London and Belgrade, the novel weaves together the elegant neighbourhoods of West Hampstead, Soho’s underground clubs, and the shattered streets of 1990s Serbia and Kosovo. It’s a story of memory, identity, and the difficult choices we make to survive - and who we become as a result.


From Under the Same Moon

"You won't invite me to come in?" Mladen says in Serbian.  

"Come in?" she repeats pointlessly, as if there is anything else he could be talking about. To come in. Into her home. 

It feels odd to be speaking in her old language, probably the first time it's ever been spoken on this road. You can overhear it sometimes in Shepherd's Bush or the distant boroughs of East London, where Serbian stores smell of smoked ham and restaurants serve veal soup and pretend cheese-pie (because you just can't get cheese sour enough to pass for Serbian). But everyone speaks English here. 

She manages to focus back on the figure standing in front of her. "You mean, now?"  

He just keeps looking at her, his face still, undisturbed by the rain sliding into a trickle around his square chin. The garden is caught in a side wind and one of the flowerpots tumbles off its stand with a crash. 

"Unless I'm not welcome," he says.  

"Of course you are," she says and glances back over her shoulder. "The only thing is …" She's hoping for a sudden noise, something to make her family's presence obvious, off-putting.  

"U cemu je stvar, Jelena?" What's the thing? 

She scrambles for an answer. "My children are in bed," she says. "And my husband is working. I mean – working in his office. If I'd known you were coming –"   

"I don't have your number." 

"I could give it to you now?" She's never been a good liar, although she did manage that one time when it counted, in the car park at Sofia airport. "I'm free tomorrow. I could buy you lunch." 

"Now is better," Mladen says and makes a small step towards her. She doesn't mean to move but somehow she yields, and in the next instant he's inside.  

Afterwards, she'll agonise over this: would he have left them alone if she'd stood her ground?  


Thursday, 9 December 2021

Angela France, "Terminarchy"


Angela France, photograph by Derek Adams


Angela France has had poems published in many leading journals and has been anthologised a number of times. Her publications include Occupation (Ragged Raven Press, 2009), Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches Press, 2011), Hide (Nine Arches Press 2013) and The Hill (Nine Arches Press 2017). The Hill was developed into a live multi-media poetry show which Angela toured, funded by Arts Council England. Her latest collection, Terminarchy, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2021 and launched at Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has an M.A. in Creative and Critical Writing and a PhD from the University of Gloucestershire. Angela teaches Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire and in various community settings.


Cover by Fumio Obata


About Terminarchy, by Angela France

Angela France’s distinctive new collection of poems, Terminarchy, eloquently considers the troubling terms of existence in an age of climate catastrophe and technological change. How do we negotiate a world where capitalism and greed threaten a fragile earth, where technology seems to promise us connection but might also fuel isolation? Where even finding solace in nature reminds us that the seasons can no longer be trusted? How is human urge and want hastening us towards our own ‘endling’ – and what might it mean to be the ‘last’? 

In reframing ecopoetics in her own instinctive, radical, lyrical form, France juxtaposes the accelerated, all-consuming speed of contemporary and future times with the ‘longtime’ and ancient, and considers whether, rather than collison-course, there might be a better way to coexist. Where extinction threatens, these wry, alert poems and their eloquent, earthy voices try to find a way through and look for hope.

You can read more about Terminarchy on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three poems from the collection. 


From Terminarchy

Endlings

             drift over the earth, gather
in loose clusters, their calls echo
        then cease.
Predators don’t notice prey, run together,
scan and scent the ground on hill and heath
in widening circles until they tire and lie down
alone.
      The Thylacine doesn’t try; he’s released
the need and drive, has given up and found
a place to lie still as he blurs and fades
to become just a shadow 
                                         on the ground.

On a branch above, 
             the passenger pigeon waits;
her claws no longer able to uncurl,
tree-bark patterning feathers as if braided
in mist. Moths and butterflies whirl
between leaves; don’t settle or rest,
ignored by the birds. The Laughing Owl,
the Forest Thrush, circle the sky
                                                possessed
by an undeniable need and scarred
by hope, until exhaustion brings peace
  in death.

A Barbary Lion calls in the hills unmarked
and Sparrow weeps for the want of an ark.

Small Gods

Our gods are poor things, these days,
insubstantial, weak in sinew and bone,
worshipped through clicks and clichés
and starved though we try to atone
through getting and losing, the sacrifice
of things we don’t need. We’ve grown
past thunder and threat, gods in disguise
to walk among us as man or bull; strength
only known or used as a way to victimise
different thoughts or ways to enhance
helpless lives. We’ve lost Thor’s hammer
Apollo’s bow and Odin’s mead, take offence
at any prick to our comfort while we clamour
on keyboards for anything to fill the holes
they’ve left.  We may edit a page’s banner
to signal who we are but try to control
anything real, of blood and flesh,
by pinning to screens where we can scroll
past whatever disturbs.  Copy, paste, refresh,
we are a worn people whose shrivelled gods
are enshrined in phone lenses as we try to possess
any thing to salve a communal sense of loss.


Down Piggy Lane

The path skulks round the back end of a housing estate,
hidden by overgrown shrubs and tattered trees
either side of the sullen brook. Scraps and patches  
of land line the trail, one-proud fences sagging between.
Pig arks are empty, fading grass straggling 
up the sides. Competing cockerels shout
from pens, hidden by a clutter of buckets,
upturned feed tubs and a green-scummed bath. 

Every patch has a shed or shelter, all alike
in their difference. Walls patched 
with multi-coloured iron, rust collecting
in the corrugations. Here an old front door 
with a fanlight and ghost of a number,
there the lichened side of a caravan.

My foot catches in the muddy ruts and humps
of the path and I stumble into a memory
of dreaming through afternoon school,
waiting for when nine-year-old legs could pump 
the bike pedals, carrying a Tupperware beaker 
of milk for feral kittens and windfall apples
stuffed under my jumper for a shaggy piebald pony. 

How have I forgotten all I wanted then?
To own one of those fields, to live 
in a ramshackle shed with the kittens 
and the pony’s head looking through 
feed-sack curtains, a few large dogs,
a nest of slow worms under the floor
and any other creature who found me.
How once such things were enough.