Roger Bygott, "Ginsberg & Manchester"

 

Roger Bygott is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. He was an ordained Buddhist for twenty years and lived in a monastery in the Spanish mountains for three years. He studied Interactive Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, which led him to co-found and co-direct Manifest Arts, a biennial arts festival in Manchester that highlighted the city's network of arts studios between 2015 and 2019. His essays have been published in Beat Scene and Dark Mountain.

About Ginsberg & Manchester, by Roger Bygott
Allen Ginsberg visited Manchester twice. He barely figures in the city's history, and Manchester barely figures in his. Yet two brief visits — a summer afternoon in 1973, a Library Theatre reading in 1979 — hold richer stories than the bare facts suggest.

Ginsberg & Manchester brings together several figures whose lives were touched by Ginsberg in different ways: Alan Wise, a charismatic music impresario (manager of Nico, John Cooper Clarke and Donovan) from Salford, whose letters to Ginsberg span fourteen years; Steven Taylor, a guitarist born in Gorton who became Ginsberg's closest musical companion for two decades; Jonathan Williams, the American avant-garde publisher (Jargon Press) who first brought Ginsberg into the city centre; and Jampa Thaye, a Manchester grammar school boy who discovered Buddhism through Kerouac, became an influential Buddhist teacher, and who was Ginsberg's host when he came to the Library Theatre. This is a story about how a great American poet left a faint but enduring mark on an English city that never quite noticed he was there.

The book also features rare and unpublished photos of Ginsberg and his associates.

You can read more about Ginsberg & Manchester on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Ginsberg & Manchester
In one of Allen Ginsberg’s date books, there’s a barely intelligible squiggle across the boxes for 4–6 June 1979. On the sixth day, at the end of the squiggle, is an arrow and the question: ‘Manchester?’ 

What was the story behind that asemic flourish? It had been five years since Ginsberg’s fleeting visit to Manchester in August 1973. There weren’t many reasons for him to return; his connection with the north-west of England was primarily with Liverpool, thanks to his fascination with the Beatles and connection with the Merseybeat poets. 

That arrowhead was inviting enquiry. What was he doing? Who was he travelling with this time? The existing biographies were of little help. Ginsberg could pack his days with meetings, readings, socialising and cultural events, so it’s not surprising that his all-too-brief visits to Manchester get short shrift in his letters and the many biographies of him.

Michael Schumacher, in his biography Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg, notes that in 1979, ‘Allen’s European reading tour included visits to Paris, Cambridge, London, Newcastle, Rotterdam and Rome – all in a whirlwind schedule that lasted less than a month.’  Manchester has got lost in the whirlwind. Barry Miles’s biography of Ginsberg mentions neither his 1973 nor his 1979 visit to Manchester. I started to wonder if the question mark in Ginsberg’s date diary might indicate a possible visit that never materialised. 

Then I discovered a June 1979 letter to his friend and fellow Beat poet Gary Snyder, sent from the Netherlands on 14 June 1979: 

After triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe – Genoa, Milan, Spoleto, Paris, Manchester, Cambridge, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – we’re dragging our weary tongues o’er the sea to Newcastle to visit [Basil] Bunting and last reading there … We brought Steven Taylor to guitar and sing and all turned out funny and energetic like a folkie tour. 

Steven Taylor, Ginsberg’s guitarist and musical director, is an integral part of the story. He was born to a working-class family in east Manchester, who emigrated to the USA in 1965 when he was ten years old. 

On 5 June, Taylor joined [Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Anne Waldman] on the 12.55 p.m. train from Euston, heading north for a reading at the Manchester Library Theatre ...

Tom Sykes, "The Years of Travelling Anxiously"

 

Tom Sykes is the author of seven books. His reportage and travel writing has appeared in New Statesman, The Independent, the Scotsman, New Internationalist and numerous other titles all over the world. He is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Global Journalism at the University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

About The Years of Travelling Anxiously, by Tom Sykes
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you're convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won't die despite being stuck with them in an ambulance in a smoky Global Southern gridlock.

Over the last twenty years, writer and academic Tom Sykes has been lucky enough to travel all over the world. But his trips have often been marred - if not ruined - by anxiety. Part travelogue, part wellbeing memoir, The Years of Travelling Anxiously recounts jittery visits to Nigeria to get married and undergo IVF treatment, stressful encounters with bigots and bureaucrats in France, the Philippines and the USA, and what can be learned about mental health on the road from a baby with an inspiringly calm attitude to travel.

The Years of Travelling Anxiously tries to solve a lifelong conundrum about the causes and consequences of panic and distress, and in so doing help other anxious travellers, or indeed anyone who gets anxious about anything, wherever they go.

You can read more about The Years of Travelling Anxiously on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From The Years of Travelling Anxiously 
I thought I’d learned. Grown. Don’t we all? We cling to these stories of progress in both society and our personal lives. From birth we’re fed maxims about life getting easier as it goes. Face your fear, conquer your fear. "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger," wrote Nietzsche. I thought I’d spent enough time in the Philippines to have squished all fear of it. After living here plus eight trips over the last thirteen years, I’ve toughed out the heat, the traffic jams, the pollution, two minor car crashes. I’ve been to the places where drug-users were executed by vigilantes. I’ve interviewed an activist who was hounded at home by a soldier who warned them to stop dissing the regime – or die. I stayed cool on all those occasions. 

I thought I’d devised strategies. I’d learned to pass the auto-stalemates by looking out the window and noting graffiti, adverts or the arbitrary poetry of urban breakdown – storm-dislodged hyacinths mantling the Pasig River, kids racing each other through a concrete pipe abandoned diagonally across a Cubao backstreet. If there was nothing to see, I’d read a book or pen my own. Writers shouldn’t be short of material in a mesmerising city like Manila. 

So why now am I in a taxi on Kalayaan Avenue, Quezon City, shaking like machine gun recoil, battling for my breath, launching water down my torrid throat? Why has the soothing inner voice of curiosity – how interesting is this, how fascinating is that – declined into the gravelly tones of paranoia? Will I make my interview on time? Are my questions facile and white and privileged? Do I smell? Why is the hand-fan strapped to the head rest in front of me only multiplying the amount of warm air rather than cooling me down? Will I have enough change for the driver at drop-off? Does the driver know where he’s going? Am I going to die? A Philippine taxi with rear seatbelts is as common as a good film starring Gerard Butler. 

These are rookie worries – or should be. Worrying about these worries only adds to the worry. It’s a self-perpetuating process.  

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.

On Writing Memoir about Growing up in Leicester in the 1960s

By Sharon Tyers

The Leicester Seamstress

My mother was a sock linker in a hosiery factory in Leicester for forty years. Sometimes she called herself an overlocker. As a child I had no idea what that meant and all I knew about socks was that she brought home the rejects from the factory floor, the ones that didn’t pass muster, for me to wear. As a result, when I was writing her story, there were many challenges along the way.

Firstly, the hosiery industry in Leicester doesn’t exist anymore but when I was growing up it was proud to say it was "a city that clothed the world." How was I to capture those times when the factories had disappeared from sight? Secondly, by the time I decided to write my mother’s story she was incapacitated and bedridden in the final throes of vascular dementia and had no voice – she could not share her memories with me. Thirdly, the moral dilemma as to whether I had the right to write about my mother’s life caused me much unrest and sleepless nights.

My first decision was to return to the city of my birth, which I left in 1979 at the age of nineteen, and retrace my steps, but that too was beset with problems. Leicester Market, a favourite haunt, where mum would drag me from stall to stall filling her shopping bag with unwashed potatoes, wet lettuces and muddy carrots, was being dug up. Huge, faceless, white boards hid its faded glory and bulldozers drowned out the shouts of the few remaining stall holders. Mum’s factory, where she started work on her fourteenth birthday in 1946, had been converted into student accommodation and was ironically called The Hosiery Factory. The chimney was still there, though, and I stood outside and imagined it smoking when mum arrived and disappeared through the enormous gates to spend the next forty years of her life. Her life may not have been glamorous but I would swear as I stood there, I could hear the giggles she shared with the other women.

Indeed, on Facebook, when I posted a picture of The Leicester Seamstress, who stands on the corner of Hotel Street, over 700 local people came forward to share their love of what she represented – the ordinary hard-working hosiery operator. I knew then I had to continue to write about not only my mother’s life but their recollections too.

So, I kept walking through the past, from Newarke where the Midland Red bus used to drop us off, through the Magazine arch and up into St Martin’s, where we never knew we were walking over the bones of Richard III who would be found thirty years later. Most importantly, I needed to stand in Fox Lane, that shortcut we took between Marks and Lewis’s where the strongman in a thin vest lifted weights for the entertainment of the shoppers and the accordion player squeezed out Lady of Spain.

Fox Lane, Leicester, 1965

These may not be the most sophisticated research methods employed by writers but I was there, you see, and I’ve realised the pictures are still in my head even if they are not still on the streets of Leicester. I completed my book in June of this year and called it The Wrong Socks.

About the author
Sharon Tyers taught English for many years at The Blue Coat School in Liverpool and now lives in North Wales where her first book, Linen and Rooks, is set. An essay, The Lost Dens of Leicester, was published by Little Toller/The Clearing in August 2025, again about her Leicester childhood. She is currently writing After the Fair, the untold story of Susan Henchard, from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. She gives talks in libraries and bookshops and campaigns for better oratory skills in schools. She misses Leicester. Her website is here. 

Alison Brackenbury, "Village"

 

Alison Brackenbury, born in Lincolnshire in 1953, is descended from long lines of servants and skilled farmworkers. She has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Thorpeness (Carcanet, 2022) and Gallop, her Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019). Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. The programmes she has written and narrated for BBC Radio 4 have been frequently been "Choices" in Radio Times, which praised her account of village life: "evocative, amusing and utterly compelling." After she left the village, Alison’s life ranged from a First-Class Oxford degree to industrial work. Memory, experience and the startling results of research have enriched Village, her brand-new, non-fiction prose book, honouring her Lincolnshire home. Alison’s writing about her village has recently been featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Financial Times, and discussed on The Verb on BBC Radio 4. Village has just been published in both digital and paperback forms. Alison's website is here. 

About Village, by Alison Brackenbury

Witches and wheelbarrows ...

Francis Weatherhogg, saddler and Census taker, had one special form to deliver. To a "witch" ... Under the shifting shadows of the walnut tree, Mary Ann opened the door of her tiny stone cottage. There she lived, unmarried, with a man whose extraordinary story spanned three continents. And Mary Ann herself – in 1891! – was still feared in her village for murderous "spells" ...

Village tells extraordinary stories of six homes, from 1841, when the first Census taker trudged up steep Hollowgate Hill, to 1971, when its author, aged 18, was driven below its thorn trees to Oxford. But she never forgot her village: Vicarage Road where Amy Mary, her grandmother, gleefully spoke of her rebellious survival of "service"; tall Rose Cottage, up "Long Lane," where Mrs Rudkin, pioneering archaeologist, brought the past to life for village children; the Mount, the farmhouse where the author’s family camped in a few grand rooms, and the mysterious cold Manor on its limestone ridge, "the Cliff" ...

The author’s memories began with cheerfulness. Her research revealed what women survived: especially abandoned, pregnant girls, struggling "Singlewomen," including Amy Mary’s own tiny, gallant sister. Yet it was in the finest houses that young wives in farming’s "Golden Age" crashed and burned.

 

And how did old Emma Jarman survive into her 80s, despite her Saturday night sessions in the Commercial Inn? She had her lift home booked with Mr Weatherhogg. In a wheelbarrow ...

You can read more about Village here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Village

What the travelling woman saw

December, 1854. A hard winter in Lincolnshire. The lane-side trees, at the village edge, are caves of white above the dark figure, bundled in shawls. She has seen many things in her calls at cottages. But never before a woman on fire ...

Beneath the bare, grey-barked arms of a young walnut tree, the cottage is tiny. Hawking or begging to survive, it is in the smallest homes she may find villagers as kind as my grandmothers will be: superstitious Amy Mary, who buys lucky tokens, or tiny, benevolent Dot, the shepherd’s wife, who gives workless men a thick slice of bread and butter, and a brief, safe place by the fire.

No answer to her knock. But through the window’s thick glass, she glimpses a dangerous light. Glinting flames lick the long skirts of a woman, crumpled on the rug. Is the traveller afraid that the villagers will call her a thief? She rushes across the lane. She shrieks to Mary Herrick.

Does Mary stamp on the creeping hems of flame? Married to a "Cottager," who farms a few acres, she can afford stout boots, stitched by John Barratt, the village shoemaker. But her middle-aged neighbour has not survived. Her fall overturned a tub. She has suffocated in a pale flood of what the Coroner and The Lincolnshire Chronicle will mysteriously call "Paste."

Blue, huge, the sky sinks. Down the lane, a young girl dawdles, carrying a tired child, returning, reluctantly, from the excitement of a village wedding.

Judith Barrington, "Virginia's Apple: Collected Memoirs"

Judith Barrington’s Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Memoirs in Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs were included in Creative Nonfiction’s “Favorite Prizewinning Essays” and as Notable Literary Nonfiction in Best American Essays. Barrington is also the author of the bestselling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art and five collections of poetry. She has taught at universities and workshops across the U.S. and in England and Spain, and was a faculty member of the MFA program of the University of Alaska: Anchorage. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

About Virginia’s Apple: Collected Memoirs, by Judith Barrington
The fourteen literary memoirs collected in Virginia’s Apple explore pivotal episodes across poet and writer Judith Barrington’s life. Artfully crafted, each one stands alone yet they are linked—characters reappear and, taken together, the pieces create a larger narrative. 

The content is wide-ranging: the early days of the Second Wave of feminism—the exhilaration, the wildness, the love affairs, the surprises, and the self-invention, as well as the confusion and conflicts of those heady times; navigating a sometimes precarious existence as an out lesbian long before it was commonplace; leaving England and becoming an American citizen; finding a life partner; and growing old with an inherited disability. The author’s friendship with the distinguished poet Adrienne Rich is the subject of one story. In another, there’s an appearance by the notorious murderer, Lord Lucan, whose wife was a chance acquaintance. 

These stories are laced with humor and joy, while pulsing below the surface is the slow unfolding of delayed grief over her parents’ drowning when she was nineteen, revealing how such a loss can shape a life.

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

From Virginia's Apple

Excerpt from “Westering” 

I woke up at dawn somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma. The sun, not yet above the horizon, was announcing itself with a wash of gold. My forehead, pressed against the window of the bus, ached. As I opened my eyes, all I could see were the colors of emptiness—the land, infinite and bare, stretching away in shades of ochre; the sky, bigger than I had ever known it, streaked with wispy clouds whose edges gleamed. I straightened up, dread rising in my throat, and looked ahead through the windshield. The highway ran on forever in a straight line. Turning back to my window, I expected to see at least a few farms or fences, a lonely shack or a corral, but was confronted instead with a mirror image of the view on the other side. With mounting horror, I looked back towards New York; perhaps we had passed through some small town that I would now see receding into the distance. But there was nothing. 

In my early twenties I’d been either adventurous or foolhardy, depending on how you look at it, when I had driven alone all over Europe, crossed Alpine passes in storms, and found my way at night through Spanish mountains populated by bandits. Here, though, was a landscape far more dangerous. I might step down from the bus and walk away with nothing but my shadow between me and the sadness I’d kept at bay for so long. Like one of those tumbleweeds, sorrow would bounce all the way to the horizon and when it returned it would, for sure, knock me for six. I grabbed the arms of my seat. 

Should I take the next Greyhound back to New York or go on to the West Coast? On my tattered map I traced my route: it would be as far to go back as it would be to go on. My finger landed on the red dot that was San Francisco.

Jonathan Taylor, "A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons"

The only remaining photo of Jonathan Taylor's short-lived career in ballet, c. 1977

Jonathan Taylor is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, where he directs the MA in Creative Writing. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), the short story collection Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023), and the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007). His new memoir is A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024). Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind. His website is here. 

 

About A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons
What does it mean to be a bully? What does it feel like to be bullied—to be a victim, a pariah, a scapegoat? What are the techniques, patterns, and languages of bullying?

Intermingling memoir with literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, A Physical Education attempts to answer these questions. A highly original exploration of the uses and abuses of power in the education system, it examines how bullying and discipline function, how they differ from each other, and how they all too often overlap.  

Taylor interweaves his own experiences with reflections on well-known literary representations of bullying and school discipline, alongside sociological, psychological, and philosophical theories of power. He discusses the transition from corporal punishment to psychological forms of discipline that took place in the UK in the 1980s, and he also investigates the divergences and convergences of physical, psychological, and linguistic bullying. 

Above all, A Physical Education sets out to understand bullying and discipline from an experiential perspective: what these things feel like from "within," rather than "above," for all concerned. There are horrors, tragedies, and cyclical traumas, certainly—but there are also absurdities, contradictions, grotesque comedies. Sometimes, beneath the Gradgrindian tyranny, there is trickery, laughter. And sometimes there are chinks in The Wall, through which other possible worlds might be glimpsed.

You can read excerpts from one of the chapters from the book on The Times Higher here. You can read further details about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read the opening of the first chapter. 

Jonathan at school, c.1982

From A Physical Education, by Jonathan Taylor

P.E.

It’s January 1985. I’m eleven. We’re lined up on the school football pitch, ankle-deep in slushy brown snow. It’s -2 degrees and raining ice, blowing across our faces in gusts like acid – which may be literally true, given the air pollution in ’80s Stoke. We’re shivering in shorts, white t-shirts, itchy ribbed socks and football boots with studs on. I’ve got plastic studs on my boots, but others like Danny Beaker – who, already at 5’11, is a good foot taller than me – have got metal spikes. There are a couple of punctures in the tops of my boots from previous games, when Danny stamped on them. 

The wet is seeping into my socks through the holes, while the sleet slanting from the sky is somehow creeping up my shorts, in a cruel contradiction of Newtonian physics. Every other part of my body is already soaking, and gradually freezing over. I glance around. The other boys are the same, wet through, hands in armpits, stamping up and down in vain effort to keep warm, their smoky breaths mingling above their heads like a big speech bubble: Get on with it, sir. 

Sir gets on with it, inevitably choosing the giant Danny Beaker as captain of one team, a second Godzilla-like boy as captain of the other. They nominate who they want on their teams in turn. I’m usually last, after ‘Pi’ the school Tory (one and only), who looks like his parents mistook a Stoke comprehensive for Marlborough, and my friend Steed, who pretends to have asthma to get out of running. In team sports, the three of us are the crumbs at the bottom of a crisp packet, the broken bits of Rich Tea in a biscuit barrel. 

Steed’s on Danny Beaker’s team, so Godzilla II gets the final crumb that is myself. He doesn’t even bother to call my name, merely rolls his eyes and turns away. He slouches over to the centre spot – or, rather, the hole in the slushy snow Sir has dug with his heels, to mark the centre spot – and waits for Sir to blow the whistle. Godzilla II’s holding his balls, jiggling on the spot, his vaporous speech bubble presumably saying: Get on with it, sir, before these freeze off.

Sir’s rather allegorical name is Mr Yorwin. He’s dressed in a brown sheepskin knee-length coat, woolly tracksuit bottoms, and is smoking a cigarette. The smouldering cigarette end is the one bit of colour in the whole landscape. “Taylor,” he grunts out of the side of his mouth, “get your arse in gear.” The other boys snigger. 

I jog over to him: “Sir, please, can’t we wear …?” But he cuts me off. 

“Don’t be a poof, Taylor. You don’t need yer tracksuits. You’ll warm up on the pitch if you play proper.”

“But, sir …”

“Shurrup. Get over there. You’re defence.”

“Some defence,” mutters Godzilla II from a distance.

Mr Yorwin blows his whistle. Danny Beaker is immediately thundering down the pitch towards me like a bull ... 

Sophie Duffy, "D is for Death"

Sophie Duffy writes about the complications and joys of family life. As a Gen-Xer, she has a particular fascination with the 70s and 80s. Her debut novel The Generation Game (Legend Press, 2011) won both the Yeovil Literary Prize and the Luke Bitmead Bursary. This Holey Life (2012), Bright Stars (2015) and Betsy and Lilibet (2018) were also published by Legend. She has written romcoms under the pen name Lizzie Lovell for Allen and Unwin and ghost-written a nurse’s memoirs. She is RLF writing fellow at the University of Manchester and also runs the Exeter Novel Prize as part of Creative Writing Matters. D is for Death is her first non-fiction book and was published in July 2024 by Hero. A Devonian, she now lives on the Wirral. 

About D is for Death, by Sophie Duffy
D is for Death is a cultural and personal roadmap of death and dying, covering all aspects from accidents and bodies to contagion and ghosts, each letter unveiling a new facet. The result of dealing with cancer during the time of Covid, D is for Death adds to the growing death positive conversation; by dragging death into the open and facing our mortality head on, we can live life more fully. The book encourages the reader to consider the choices for the disposal of your body, to write your funeral plan, to talk about grief and loss, to explore the significance of terror and war, to reflect on the impact of climate change, to ponder the mysteries that defy explanation. Full of stories, information and memoir, D is for Death embraces the one certainty that binds us all – the journey from A-Z.

You can read more about D is for Death on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From D is for Death

We are in the NAAFI canteen of Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker beneath the green fields of Cheshire. Initially, a bombing decoy site for Crewe railway station, in 1941, it became RAF Hack Green, defending the land between Birmingham and Liverpool. Following WW2, it was converted to a Cold War bunker; in the event of a nuclear attack, Hack Green would be responsible for the territory stretching from Cheshire to Cumbria. No longer secret, the bunker is now open to the public. We have just watched a film loop playing the public information film Protect and Survive, told in the reassuring voice of Patrick Allen how to deal with dead family members: wrap in polythene, tag, bury. 

I am with my partner, Neil, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Ella, eating  ‘wartime tomato soup and bread,’ drinking tea from tin cups. Ella is used to visiting odd places with her stepmother. (Thankfully, she is a stoic child). Neil, who grew up on the Wirral, says they were told at school not to worry, because the second the bomb hit the chemical plants of Runcorn, they’d be eviscerated. I think about my home in Devon. Probably a hideous slow death. I remember the existential threat of annihilation which hung over the childhoods and teenage years of Gen-Xers, seeping into pop culture. ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Murakami’s film of Raymond Briggs’s Where the Wind Blows. (Not exactly The Snowman). Now, underground, whilst tucking into carrot cake, Ella recounts how her friend is anxious about a nuclear attack with Putin pushing the button. She is dismissive. I wish I had her presence of mind. Why fret about tomorrow? 

Before we leave, we browse the souvenirs. She chooses a magnet. On the journey home, in the back of the car, Ella holds it like a talisman. As we head onto the Wirral, chemical plants in view, she asks: would my magnet survive a nuclear blast? We swap a look, her dad and me. What should we say? Ella answers her own question. ‘No point worrying. We’ll all be dead.’

 

Corinne Fowler, "Our Island Stories"

Corinne Fowler, photo by Osborne Photography

Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. She is co-investigator of the Leverhulme Rural Racism Project, led by Professor Neil Chakraborti at the University’s Centre for Hate Studies. In 2020 Corinne co-authored an audit of peer-reviewed research about National Trust properties’ connections to empire, which encouraged the heritage sector to address its colonial stories and became a major media story. The report won the Museums and Heritage Special Recognition Award, 2022 and the Eastern Eye Community Engagement Award 2023. Corinne directed Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, a child-led history and writing project with Peepal Tree Press with commissioned photographer Ingrid Pollard (2018-2022). Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain was published on 2 May 2024 by Penguin Allen Lane.

About Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain
This book of country walks opens up the colonial history of Britain’s rural life and landscapes. The countryside is cherished by many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. Where the countryside is celebrated, histories of empire are forgotten. In Our Island Stories, Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks, roaming the island with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton.

Empire transformed rural lives for better and for worse: whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities, and the select few who benefited, directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to shape lives across Britain today.

To give an honest account, to offer both affection and criticism, is a matter of respect: we should not knowingly tell half a history. This new knowledge of our island stories, once gained, can only deepen Britons' relationship with their beloved landscape.

You can read more about Our Island Stories on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the introduction to the book. 

 

From Our Island Stories, by Corinne Fowler

From ‘Introduction: A Colonial History of the British Countryside’ 

I took the train to Pangbourne, some 20 miles west of Windsor. Perched at the confluence of the Thames and the River Pang, the settlement is ancient: its name was first recorded in 844 CE. The Pang, which gives the village its name, is a tributary of the Thames, a chalkstream which remains full of life despite the farm fertilizers, pesticides and sewage which pollute the local rivers. Voles still swim in its water meadows, just as they did when Kenneth Grahame used to go boating thereabouts in the early twentieth century. Along with other riverine creatures, the water vole appears as Ratty in Grahame’s much-loved children’s classic The Wind in the Willows, a book which re-enchanted generations of readers with the English countryside: its financial success enabled Grahame to retire to a gable-ended cottage in Pangbourne, where he lived until his death in 1932. 

Crammed with listed buildings and expensive real estate, Pangbourne has long attracted people with money: people in search of this bucolic idyll. In the eighteenth century, wealth flooded into Pangbourne, much of it linked to the East India Company. Founded in 1600 by English merchants to trade between Europe, South Asia and the Far East, it became far more than a trading company. Acquiring its own army, it fought rival East India Companies from the European powers such as France and Holland, competing for the lion’s share of trade in spices, cotton, silk, indigo and saltpetre. The English – later British – East India Company established and defended warehouses, forts and trading posts all over India, including Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Surat. Over time, it conquered territory, collected taxes and eventually colonized India. When East India Company employees had made their pile and returned home, many headed for the Thames valley – so many, in fact, that it became known as ‘England’s Hindoostan.’ A former governor of Madras lived 3 miles south of Pangbourne, at Englefield; the former governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, had a residence at Purley Hall, a mile or so from the village. 

I had come to Pangbourne in search of one of these figures, Sir Francis Sykes. I planned to walk the riverside path along the Thames valley to Basildon Park, a landscaped and wooded estate surrounded by a handsome brick and flint wall and, within it, the house that Sykes built: a grand Palladian pile, constructed with the proceeds of his Indian adventures, and now owned by the National Trust. With me would come the historian Sathnam Sanghera, author of the influential Empireland, a personal journey into British colonial history. As we walked, we’d talk about Britain, India and the culture war into which our work had plunged us both.

Sam Alexandra Rose, "The CMMRD Book"

 

Sam Alexandra Rose is a three-time cancer survivor with an ultra-rare genetic condition called CMMRD. She is a PhD student at Teesside University researching how she can use Creative Writing to shape meaning from her illness experiences. She works as a Patient and Public Involvement Manager for charity Bowel Research UK. Sam has had poetry and prose published in over 70 literary magazines and anthologies, and has written two nonfiction books. 

You can read about her memoir, Gut Feelings; Coping with Cancer and Living with Lynch Syndrome, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Below, you can read all about her latest publication, The CMMRD Book. 

About The CMMRD Book: A Mismatch Memoir and Guide, by Sam Alexandra Rose

While on average people with CMMRD get their first cancer diagnosis at just 7.5 years old, Sam Alexandra Rose is beating the odds in her mid-thirties. But it comes at a price, with three cancer experiences and a whole lot of fear and trauma to sort through.

Part memoir, part guide and with a little poetry thrown in, this book illustrates what it’s like to live with a rare genetic condition and significantly increased cancer risk.

This is a book of denial, hope and eventual acceptance, ideal for families wanting to know more about a CMMRD diagnosis and for healthcare professionals looking to better understand the patient experience.

You can read more about The CMMRD Book here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book.

From The CMMRD Book

I had assumed I had accepted cancer and Lynch syndrome, and it wasn’t until I interrogated my innermost workings a little deeper that I realised I hadn’t really accepted it at all. I was getting knowledge confused with acceptance, and knowing something is going to happen and accepting it are two different things. Even if you acknowledge that something is happening, and agree to deal with it and make accommodations so that it can happen, that isn’t necessarily acceptance. And I needed acceptance because it was so difficult to be pulled from normal daily life into the medical world every time a new appointment or set of results cropped up.

I was treating each appointment, surgery, screening, and cancer diagnosis as an individual event rather than part of a whole – the whole of course being CMMRD, though I didn’t think about it in those exact terms at the time. I wondered if it would help for me to accept that I was a person with CMMRD, that CMMRD was an ongoing thing that was always there, rather than something that came and went like a horrible tide pulling scalpels and hospital gowns to my shores when I least expected it. I often felt as if I were straddling two worlds, trying to exist in the “normal” world while the medical world was waiting for me and could pounce at any moment. I would be in the office at the digital marketing agency where I worked at the time and I would get a phone call from the hospital asking to book me in for an appointment. All of a sudden I’m not thinking about writing blog posts or emailing my clients; I’m once again considering the prospect of the cancer returning and having to ask my boss for time off to go to my screening. But what if I didn’t have to deal with it all bit by bit? After all, you don’t need to worry about returning to the medical world if you never leave it. Is that really better? At first, I thought it was admitting defeat to resign myself to the reality that I would always be going back and forth to the hospital. But acceptance is not defeat. It could in fact mean more peace of mind.

Tim Hannigan, "The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey"

Congratulations to UoL PhD English and Creative Writing graduate, Tim Hannigan, whose book The Granite Kingdom has recently been published by Head of Zeus!

Tim Hannigan was born and brought up in the far west of Cornwall. After starting his working life as a chef, he eventually made it to the University of Gloucestershire to study Journalism, after which he moved to Indonesia where he began his writing career as a travel journalist. His first book, Murder in the Hindu Kush, was published in 2011, and he subsequently wrote several books on Indonesian history. In 2016 he started work on a critical-creative PhD at the University of Leicester, supported by the Midlands4Cities DTP. This project produced his book The Travel Writing Tribe, published by Hurst in 2021. He lives in the west of Ireland and combines his writing with part-time teaching roles at the Technological University of the Shannon and the University of Hull. His website is here. 

About The Granite Kingdom

From Daphne du Maurier to Doc Martin, and from the romantic melodrama of Poldark to gritty TV depictions of the modern fishing industry, Cornwall is densely laden with images, projections and tropes. But how does all this intersect with the real place, its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity? In The Granite Kingdom, Tim Hannigan sets out on a meandering, 300-mile journey to find out, travelling on foot from the banks of the River Tamar to his childhood home near Land’s End. 

Combining travel writing, memoir, history and literary criticism, the book explores the varied landscapes of Britain’s westernmost region and grapples with the complex idea of Cornwall itself – a cosy English seaside destination for some, a fiercely independent Celtic nation for others and one of Britain’s most impoverished post-industrial regions for others still. It considers the way literary narratives from without have sometimes informed identities from within – including the author’s own – and asks awkward questions about what it means to be “Cornish” in the twenty-first century.

Below, you can read an excerpt from The Granite Kingdom.

From The Granite Kingdom, by Tim Hannigan

Chapter One: Bordering

If you stand at the threshold of Number 2 Cyprus Well, you have a choice. It is the middle cottage of three in a little terrace facing a bank of sycamore saplings on a steep lane called Ridgegrove Hill. Above the single ground-floor window, a plaque records that ‘Charles Causley, Poet’ lived here from 1952 to 2003. They might have added the word ‘Cornish’ to the description, for that is the adjective most commonly associated with Causley. And indeed, he lived in Cornwall – right here in Launceston, in fact – not just for fifty-one years, but for almost his whole life. 

But if you stand at the threshold of Cyprus Well and turn left, you can see Devon. 

It shows beyond the point where the lane bends downhill: a gathering groundswell of trees and pasture. From the doorstep of Causley’s cottage, it seems natural to turn that way, to go with the flow. At the bottom of Ridgegrove Hill you’ll meet the little River Kensey. Within a mile, the Kensey will carry you to the Tamar, and the Tamar will bear you away south, between dark woods to the grey docks and end-of-terrace pubs of Plymouth, with the busy waters of the English Channel beyond. But if it’s Cornwall that you want, then you have to turn against gravity, against nature, pull steeply up Ridgegrove Hill then on up Angel Hill to pass, breathless, beneath the fortified arch on Southgate Street. And if it’s a decent prospect to the westward that you’re after, you’ll need to cross to the other side of Launceston and climb the motte of the castle. 

On a midsummer morning, I stood on the pavement outside Number 2 Cyprus Well. It was early, and up the hill Launceston gave off the faint hum of a small town readying itself for the working day. To the east, the valleys were liquid with yellow mist. A few intersecting ridges rose above the flood, trees and hedges in dark profile. But it wasn’t clear to whom they belonged. I glanced left and right, fiddled with the straps of my backpack, looked at the map. Then I turned downhill, into the mist ....

Sabyn Javeri (ed.), "Ways of Being: Creative Non-Fiction by Pakistani Women"

About Ways of Being: Creative Non-Fiction by Pakistani Women, ed. Sabyn Javeri

Does writing have a nationality? Are writers defined by geography, language, religion, gender and ethnicity alone, or are there other attributes that identify them? Fifteen of the most articulate and creative non-fiction writers from Pakistan eloquently demonstrate that, as Sabyn Javeri says, "Who you are is more accurately represented by what you stand for, than by where you are from."

Large-scale migration and transnational mobility have rendered national borders porous, while the Internet has internationalised communication in a way that practically erases territorial boundaries. Questions about "being" and "belonging" acquire an urgency that demands articulation: how does a writer relate to her context, whether at "home" or "away," and locate herself and her writing in it? For the purposes of this anthology, Javeri believes that "A Pakistani writer is one who feels a connection to the land either by origin or by sensibility."

This rich and fascinating collection of reflections, reminiscences, musings—and excellent writing—features Taymiya R. Zaman, Hananah Zaheer, Feryal Ali Gauhar, Sadia Khatri, Saba Karim Khan, Soniah Kamal, Kamila Shamsie, Saybn Javeri, Rukhsana Ahmad, Humera Afridi, Muneeza Shamsie, Uzma Aslam Khan, Shahnaz Rouse, Noren Haq and Bina Shah. They are among the best creative non-fiction writers anywhere.

Below, you can read an excerpt from the Introduction to the anthology. 

About the editor

Sabyn Javeri is Senior Lecturer of Writing, Literature & Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She is the author of Hijabistan and Nobody Killed Her, and has edited two multilingual anthologies of student writing, The Arzu Anthology of Student Voices (Vols. I & II). Her writing has been widely anthologised and published in the London Magazine, Litro, Bookends Review, South Asian Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Wasafiri, among others. She has an MSt from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. Her research interests include transcultural feminism, South Asian literature & literary translation, inclusive pedagogy and Creative Writing.

From Ways of Being

Encounters with Life: An Introduction

By Sabyn Javeri

When the idea of putting together an anthology of Pakistani women writer’s creative non-fiction was put to me by the feminist publisher, Ritu Menon, I hesitated. The first question that ran through my mind was, but who is a Pakistani writer? Who has the right to call herself a Pakistani writer? Someone who lives in the country, or someone who carries the country within her? Upon a quick search I found that I was not the only one deliberating this point. The question of who a Pakistani writer is has dominated many a discussion in recent debates on global anglophone literature—but it has raised more questions than answers.  

I found myself wondering who, in this age of mass displacement, when very few of us have the luxury to be rooted in one place, can claim to belong solely and wholly anywhere at all? To complicate matters, the rise of the Internet has shrunk traditional borders, making the question of identity even more fraught. Economic migration, religious persecution, emerging right-wing nationalism and populism, pandemics and lockdowns have forced many of us to reckon with a new plurality of identities, where the boundaries of nationality or a singular cultural identity are no longer relevant in the context of our dynamic times. It is, instead, a question of voice that matters. I found myself thinking: who you are is no longer a question of "where you are from"; rather, who you are is more accurately represented by "what you stand for." A Pakistani writer, therefore, for the purposes of this anthology, is one who feels a connection to the land either by origin or by sensibility.

Although the idea of separating writers by gender does not appeal to me, it is with some trepidation that I admit that there is a tradition of women’s writing in Pakistani anglophone literature that merits a place of its own. It provides the reader with a different point of view, a minority outlook, an underdog history, parallel yet complementary to the historical context and the socio-political journey of the country and its diaspora. Although it fits into the larger tradition of Pakistani women’s writing, it has some distinct features of its own. For one thing, English as a language is equivalent to currency in a country like Pakistan and those who make a choice to write in it, do so consciously. The legacies of British colonialism that manifest themselves linguistically 70 years after Partition mean that many of us grew up in households where English was the norm. For others it is an English medium education that leads to a natural inclination to write in the language they think in. Therefore, the choice and skill to write in English not only changes the readership, it bestows a slightly different lens to the reception. Many anglophone writers have been criticised for the fact that class privilege, global education and an international audience influence their themes, which seem to be more global than local. This criticism is often unfounded as it oversimplifies the subtle subtext of the writing. Writers should not be expected to be mouthpieces or representatives of their ethnicity. They should not be dictated to or prejudiced by expectations for they are artists, not activists, and accountable only for the authenticity of their work not the congeniality of their subject matter. 

In this anthology, the essays reflect the experience of the writers and what matters to them. They represent the diversity of the Pakistani woman’s experience, and they embrace any such differences of topic and language as celebratory rather than flawed. At times they may present a wider political view, and at other times a narrower perspective in the form of the local and the personal. The themes are varied, but what they have in common is that they shatter the stereotype of the submissive Pakistani woman and speak for a cross-section of society, across generations and from around the globe. Another characteristic is the ability of these writers to view the world bilingually. This adds a certain filament to Pakistani anglophone writing which makes it distinct from the vernacular, but still "accented" as opposed to standard English writing. This is because the writing leans towards a postcolonial turn, falling into the category of "other Englishes" as a form of artistic resistance. Many Pakistani anglophone writers do great justice in translating the local flavour and dismantling the exoticism or orientalism of the subcontinent in contemporary English literature. 

Although the anglophone tradition differs from that of Urdu or vernacular women writers in Pakistan, it does not mean that it fits wholly into the tradition of western women’s writing. The starting point for this has to be an acknowledgement that while women all over the world share many universal values and oppressions, not all women are the same. With apologies to George Orwell, "All women are born equal, but some women are more equal than others." Just as class plays a huge part in the experience of gender, so does race. This varies the experience of what it means to be Pakistani, especially as an immigrant. It diversifies their concerns, their self-perception and outlook. For the diasporic or second-generation Pakistani woman writer, who may find English the natural choice of language, the experience of being a minority still places her writing outside the mainstream. For the local writer, pressures of representation add to the dilemma of speaking up and finding one’s true voice. "Criticise your culture and you are pandering to the West, praise your country and you are pandering to the patriarchy…" as the wonderfully outspoken Fahmida Riaz said in an interview once. Like her, many Pakistani women writers find themselves in a situation where their individuality is negated for they inevitably become representatives of their "kind." And if they deviate from the dominant narrative they risk being accused of inauthenticity.  And so it is that the most damning difficulty they face is overcoming an implicit bias—sometimes on the part of critics and reviewers, other times in the form of self-censorship. These factors distinguish Pakistani women writing in English from their counterparts in other parts of the English-speaking world.

To a large degree, Pakistan’s short but complex socio-political history still plays a part in defining a woman writer's identity, her values, her subject matter, and most importantly, the reception of her work. Despite many women poets, journalist and writers, speaking up, we still experience a tradition of silencing. We have gruesome, politically motivated murders like that of Sabeen Mahmood who is credited, among many other wonderful legacies, with having revived the literary scene in Karachi through her initiative, The Second Floor. While social media have provided a forum for many women to speak out from the safety of their screens, they still encounter immense trolling, and we still have "honour-killing" victims like Qandeel Baloch who pay with their lives for publicly raising their voices. But we also have survivors like Malala Yousufzai who carry the beacon of hope for Pakistani women, fighting for female literacy and the right for women to tell their stories through the written word—who can forget that Malala’s writing journey began with a blog on BBC urdu.com. One cannot deny that technology has impacted Pakistani women writers. The outreach of their voices has expanded via easy access to the Internet in urban cities, and through it, a rising feminist consciousness is challenging gendered violence and patriarchal gender norms. Whether through the Aurat March or through social media activism such as the #MeToo and #GirlsattheDhaba movements, they are finding new ways to tell their stories ...

Susan Richardson, "Where the Seals Sing"

 

Susan Richardson is a writer, performer and educator whose debut work of creative non-fiction, Where the Seals Sing, has just been published by William Collins. She has also written four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Words the Turtle Taught Me, emerged from her residency with the Marine Conservation Society and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. In addition to her ongoing writing residency with the British Animal Studies Network, facilitated by the University of Strathclyde, she has shared her work on BBC Two and Radio 3, enjoyed a four-year stint as one of the resident poets on Radio 4’s Saturday Live and performed at festivals both nationally and internationally.

About Where the Seals Sing

Blending natural history and travel, science and shamanism, memoir and myth, Where the Seals Sing offers a deep dive into the life of the grey seal, a species by which Susan Richardson has been fascinated since childhood. On foot and by boat, she journeys round Britain's coast, discovering locations both inspiring and surprising, from barely-accessible crags and crevices to an industrial riverscape of petro-chemical and nuclear power plants. She visits the howling heart of a breeding colony, delves beneath the skin of shapeshifting selkie tales and engages, too, with the many dangers that seals face, from marine debris to toxic pollution.

As she gains greater insights into the impact of these threats, Richardson explores how we may more sensitively co-exist with another species in our increasingly denatured land. What will be the next chapter in our attitude towards these animals whose bone remains have been found in Bronze Age kitchen middens and who have swum for so many centuries through our cultural and spiritual lives?

You can see more information about Where the Seals Sing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Where the Seals Sing, by Susan Richardson

Chivvied along by a stonechat, wing-flicking and flitting from fence post to gorse, I sidestep down a steep incline and start to curve north. Soon the final beach will come into view, the most sheltered of the three, nestled in the lee of an outcrop, free from the force of prevailing wind and waves. First, though, my gaze, as if trapped as the incidental catch of a gillnet, is dragged back towards the sea. I count two, three, four marker buoys … and is that a fifth? No – it resolves, through binoculars, into a mottled head that slopes to a nose fringed by a quiver of whiskers. An Atlantic grey seal, an adult cow, her large, dark eyes fixed landwards.

The cries are closer here but a beach boulder greened with algae is still concealing their source. Fortunately, I’m able to veer off the coast path, thrash through brambles and hoick myself onto a ledge, over the edge of which I can hang, stomach down on rock and patchy grass, to check out the beach from an unobstructed angle.

And there it is.

White fur stained with blood and yellow fluids. Its whole body jerking with the effort of each cry.

A recently born seal pup.

Its mother, resting a few metres away, is ignoring it, her pebble-and-kelp surrounds also smeared with blood. Another few metres further on, a mob of great black-backed gulls attacks the afterbirth, pulling it out of its steak-like shape into a stringier form, gorging torn-off scarlet strands, then tug-of-warring with the remains.

The pup appears to make an attempt to move towards its mother but manages only to flop onto its side, exposing a pink inch of umbilical cord worming from its belly fur. Mother–pup bonding seems to have been neither instant nor straightforward – the cow is more focused on the gulls than her pup and whenever a yank on the afterbirth brings one of them too close, she lunges, neck stretched, teeth bared, snarling.