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.

Peter Kalu, "Act Normal"

Pete Kalu recently received the Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship Award 2024 for his "impressively experimental, thoughtful and challenging" writing. His memoir-essay mashup, Act Normal, was published in October 2025 by Hope Road. He is also the author of the novel One Drop (Andersen, 2022). His short stories can be found in Book of Manchester (Comma Press, 2024), Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree, 2024), Collision (Comma Press, 2023), Glimpse (Peepal Tree, 2023). Instagram: @petekalu

About Act Normal, by Peter Kalu
In this polemical and poetic collection of 250 mini-essays, personal history becomes a lens for cultural critique. Through fragments and feeling, it asks what we remember, what we forget, and who gets to tell the story. Unflinching and yet tender, these  vignettes are a fierce yet joyous meditation on Black memory, identity, and resistance. Merging memoir, reflections and observations in the style of Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, Act Normal challenges erasure, mourns what was lost, and dreams of what could be. This is a lyrical reckoning with history, silence, and the radical act of speaking back.

You can read more about Act Normal on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short sample from the book. 

From Act Normal

Watermelon

I have great difficulty eating watermelon in front of white people. Throughout my childhood white people invested so much time and energy in their literature making us into these eye-rolling, big-grinning picaninny idiots who chomped on the big green and red fruits that I boycotted them for decades. Then I met someone from Iran, and they loved watermelon and didn’t carry my cultural baggage. They were mad for it. Watermelon was in their fridge, on their kitchen counters, in their dreams and all over their late-night cravings. I was tempted. In my mind, I resisted. So much weight and volume, so little taste, those slithery pips that require spitting out making it an outdoor fruit rather than a dining room fruit, the crazy prices, the ecological damage of growing those things which drink litres and litres of water, the mess, the stickiness, the perfumy smell … My mind went on and on, but my stomach rumbled and I gave in. Now I eat watermelon clandestinely. I only buy it from black stores. I only eat it around Global Majority people. My daughters eat watermelon unproblematically. "Deal with your issues, Dad," they tell me, "Deal with your issues." 

Kim Moore, "What the Trumpet Taught Me"

 

Kim Moore, photograph by Lorna Elizabeth

Kim Moore‘s first full length collection The Art of Falling was published by Seren in April 2015 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She won a New Writing North Award in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2012. Kim was one of the judges in the 2018 National Poetry Competition, along with Kei Miller and Mark Waldron and a judge for the 2020 Forward Prizes.

Her first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in The Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. If We Could Speak Like Wolves was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Pamphlet Award and the Lakeland Book of the Year Award. Kim’s latest full length collection is All the Men I Never Married (Seren, 2021). 

Kim is originally from Leicester. Her website is here. 

About What the Trumpet Taught Me, by Kim Moore 

Award-winning poet Kim Moore studied music and was a trumpet teacher for several years. What the Trumpet Taught Me is a collection of vivid and immediate snapshots, from first lessons to music college, and from teaching the trumpet in schools and running a brass band, right through to playing in working men’s clubs in a ten-piece soul band.

Meditative and often funny, these short prose pieces are always open to experience and clear-eyed about the vagaries of class-prejudice and the intricacies of gender in a predominantly male world. The trumpet is the central character that we always return to as we are asked to consider the pivotal role of music in both an individual and social history.

What the Trumpet Taught Me features watercolour illustrations by Emma Burleigh.

From What the Trumpet Taught Me

My parents take us to a brass band, recommended by my new brass teacher, Mr P, as a place we can get an instrument for free. I ask for a cornet, after watching a young girl playing one with a pearl-like sheen. My sister is given a tenor horn. The conductor, who says we can call him by his first name, W, tells us to join in with the rehearsal, though we cannot read music. I’m told to sit next to a girl with a fox-like face.

I don’t understand why the music in front of me has numbers above each note, rather than letters. I don’t understand that the numbers correspond to the valves I should be pressing down. I don’t even know they are called valves. I’m happily playing along, pressing the valves whenever I feel like it. I don’t know a conductor can hear one person playing a wrong note, even when there are thirty other people playing. Eventually, when I find this out, it seems as if it’s a superpower, and one I’ll never possess.

W is an elderly man with bone-white hair. He waves his arms, urging us onward. Although it doesn’t seem as if anybody is looking at him, or noticing what he’s doing, I understand he is important, that the weather of the room starts and finishes with him. 

A. J. Lees, "Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology"

A. J. Lees was born in St Helens and qualified in medicine from The London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1970. He trained in neurology at University College Hospitals, London and La Salpêtriere in Paris and was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square at the age of 32. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and was responsible for the introduction of apomorphine therapy as a treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. For his contributions to medical education and his research achievements, he was elected a member of the Brazilian Academia Nacional de Medicina in 2010. 

His first book to be published by Notting Hill Editions, entitled Mentored by a Madman, described how the writings of William Seward Burroughs helped him to operate effectively within the complex milieu of UK medical research and inspired some of his research. Several of his books, including Ray of Hope and The Hurricane Port, grew out of  a deep love for the port of Liverpool. His last book, Brazil that Never Was, described a yearning for an idealised adolescent past, in which he had dreamed of losing himself in the Amazon forest, inspired by the adventures of Lieutenant Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett. His new book is Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology, published jointly by Notting Hill Editions and New York Review of Books. 

About Brainspotting:  Adventures in Neurology

This is a collection of essays explaining the making of a neurologist. An interest in bird watching as a child taught Lees the importance of observation and the need to record precisely what one sees, skills which gave him a head start when he began his training in neurology. In another chapter, he explains how the methods of crime detection used by Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes were a valuable introduction to the  diagnostic method of neurology, but in order to relieve suffering it needed to be combined with the humanity of Dr Watson. Lees believes that people can be trained to see things their mind does not yet know, and that attentive listening not only gives neurologists the diagnosis in two-thirds of cases but, like touch during the physical examination, can be a transformative healing ritual. In the last chapter, while extolling the miracle of modern neuroimaging, he warns that when used inappropriately or as a substitute for clinical training brain scanners can become weapons of mass destruction.

You can see more details about Brainspotting on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read three short excerpts from the book.

 

From Brainspotting, by A. J. Lees

When I tell people I am a neurologist, very few have much idea of what I do. Common reactions are: "Isn’t that the same as Gregory House?" or "How wonderful it must be to study the human mind?" When I reply that I make the blind see, the lame walk and can calm the shaking palsy, many assume I must be a brain surgeon. The media prefer to call me a "leading neuroscientist" even though I spend no time in a laboratory and carry out no research on the healthy brain ...

My mother, who sometimes used birds to tell fortunes, conserved my bird journals for many years. After I had qualified as a doctor she handed them back to me, reminding me how as a twelve-year-old I had felt the need to name every little brown bird that came into view. She then said, "Do you remember when you found that dead blue tit unmarked in the garden and how you buried it under the laburnum marking its resting place with an ice lolly stick?" At the time she had told me that when sailors were lost at sea blue tits carried their souls to heaven ...

Soulful neurology has realistic expectations that allow me to reduce the burden of suffering through my understanding of life as well as my scientific credentials. It embraces anecdote, cordial laughter and tacit knowledge but never lapses into sentimentality. It insists that mistakes in medicine are inevitable, but when they are admitted and taken to heart  become future friends. It expects me to talk unhurriedly to my patients as if they were my close relatives and to try to be kind and nuanced when forced to give bad news. It reminds me that neurological disorders can rupture aspirations and dreams and lead to frustration, loneliness and a profound sense of hopelessness ...

A. J. Lees, "Brazil That Never Was"

A. J. Lees was born in St Helens and qualified in medicine from The London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1970. He trained in neurology at University College Hospitals, London and La Salpêtriere in Paris and was appointed to the staff of the National Hospital, Queen Square at the age of 32. He is one of the three most highly cited Parkinson’s disease researchers in the world and was responsible for the introduction of apomorphine therapy as a treatment for advanced Parkinson’s disease. For his contributions to medical education  and his research achievements  he was elected a member of the Brazilian Academia Nacional de Medicina in 2010. 

His first book to be published by Notting Hill Editions, entitled Mentored by a Madman, described how the writings of William Seward Burroughs helped him to operate effectively within the complex milieu of UK medical research and inspired some of his research. Several of Lees's books, including Ray of Hope and The Hurricane Port, grew out of a deep love for the port of Liverpool.

 

About Brazil That Never Was

By  A. J. Lees

Brazil That Never Was is about my yearning for an idealised past. When my visits to the Liverpool docks with my father abruptly ended, a library book that told the story of an explorer who had  disappeared in the Mato Grosso came to the rescue. The evenings I spent reading about his vanishing  were as alive as any I can remember from my childhood and reconnected me with Brazil. Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett had written in his log book: ‘The forest in these solitudes is always full of voices, the soft whisperings of those that came before.' His adventure insulated me from my first perceived failures and created an enclave of mystery beyond the scope of charts. I hoped that Fawcett could lead me to a place where there was no way out.

Even after I had become a neurologist and learned to diagnose brain injury in the street, the Brazil of my bedroom remained. In spite of  my new deductive skills and  love of material rationalism I was sometimes overcome with a dangerous sentimentality that stemmed from an indelible screen memory of Brazil. I felt as if something had gone missing and increasingly desired a fugitive moment in time that I feared would never return.

Fifty years after I had first read Exploration Fawcett, I set out on a quest to try to get answers. What I discovered was far more extraordinary than any of the wild notions put forward to explain Fawcett’s vanishing in 1925. A psychedelic encounter in the Amazon convinced me that my past had never really existed and that I could never go home.  

From Brazil That Never Was

By A. J. Lees

The Oakwood Library became my sanctuary. Its grand drawing rooms, with picture rails and sunburst stucco ceilings, were lined with hardbacked books, fresh and stale, fat and thin, large and small. I roamed the shelves, following paths that fascinated me, and taking in the scent of wisdom. The hours flashed by in minutes as I sat on the ledge of the bay window absorbing the colourful stories of the dead. Cocooned in this place, I was able to divine the Atlantic from a grain of salt. 

My father brought down a dog-eared book with soiled green cloth boards called Exploration Fawcett. It still had the remains of its dust jacket showing three men in a canoe confronting a giant snake. 'You’ll enjoy this,' he whispered with that knowing voice and quiet smile that had made him such an inspiring and popular schoolmaster. 'It’s about an explorer who vanished without trace in the Amazon' ....

In bed at night I read about Lieutenant-Colonel Fawcett, one of the very last heroic Victorian explorers who for ten years had trekked down death-filled rivers surveying stretches of disputed territory on the borders of Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. At the river port of Rurrenbaque he had watched a woman suckle a litter of pigs and at Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the tropical lowlands of Bolivia he learned of new-born children being fed to swine. He wrote that one night he had been awakened by a jaguar rubbing against his back as it slunk under his hammock.

Fawcett wrote that no imagination could conjure up a vision equal to the beauty of the reality. The Mato Grosso was irresistible, with its low whistling bird song and gorgeous butterflies. The monochrome photographs in the book depicted a lost world but one that felt intensely familiar. A sketch of a drowning man being eaten by piranhas at the beginning of one chapter emphasised the dangers, while the line drawings of ruins and hieroglyphs raised my expectations of an El Dorado.

The Dream I Held in My Hands

By Karen Argent

In October 2017 The Letterpress Project, a not-for-profit initiative that promotes the importance of the printed book, lost one of its founder members, the wonderful Jane Slowey. She died from a disease that she had fought off once but couldn’t keep at bay a second time, and she died far too young. 

As she had always brought her keen enthusiasm and skills to the project, we wanted to publish a tribute to Jane’s ability to inspire those she met. We asked people to honour her memory by thinking about which books had inspired their imaginations – and the response was exceptional. The result was an anthology of short pieces about reading called The Dream I Held in My Hands: Dedicated to the Memory of Jane Slowey.

The beautifully illustrated book is available as a free pdf from The Letterpress Project website here, and is also available as a limited printed publication by request. Please contact karen [dot] argent [at] btinternet [dot] com for further details.

Below you can read one of the essays from the book. 

An Enchantment: The Book That Made Me a Reader

By Leila Rasheed

I still have the book. I hold it in my forty-year-old hand, and the ghost of my seven-year-old hand holds it too: an enchantment, like those padlocks on bridges that mean two lovers clasp each other, hand in hand, forever. In 1980s Benghazi, where I grew up, there were no shops, or very few – a baker, a butcher, the souk, and one vast, concrete department store that had nothing inside it but a sack of flour, leaking and weevil-ridden on a pallet. Libya had its own enchantments, curses and hauntings, but for books we had to migrate. I would guess we bought this particular book at Galt or Early Learning, during one of our summer journeys back to England.

I’ll put it down here, so you can see it properly. The first thing you’ll note is the fragility. The pages are weathered yellow, and it comes in chunks, this book; sections splitting off from an osteoporotic spine from which the glue has long ago perished. The spine has been Sellotaped and re-Sellotaped until the tape shatters at the touch. Love spells sometimes look like this: like a padlock on a bridge, or an unskilled repair. Spells to keep things, like people, from coming apart. 

With a title like The Puffin Book of Magic Verse, you would expect a dark cover. But the cover is nothing as obvious as black. It’s deep purple, the colour of a Libyan-grown aubergine, burnished by a diet of sun. And now the other magic flickers into life, the magic fire of illustrations. This book may have made me a reader, but it was never just the words that did that. Look at the head on the cover. It must belong to a child, but what a child! The offspring of the Medusa and the Green Man - hair bristling thick with leaves, owls, cats, witches. Genderless, the face doesn’t look directly at the reader, but off to one side. The child’s eyes and mouth are a little open, not in glee or rage, but in wonder. As if it has just seen something astonishing - and this, mark you, when it, itself, is the strangest thing that any reader could ever have seen. From the very cover, the book isn’t inviting you to read it. It isn’t daring you to read it. Like the master magician’s spell book, it is just there, and you reading it or not is a matter of indifference to it. What child wouldn’t open a book on these tempting terms? What are you looking at? Can I come with you? 

Open the book, then, and step in. Immediately you are falling into poems, like Alice down the rabbit hole, woozy, twisting, slow and dreamlike. When you find your feet, the floor staggers, tilts you forward. The whole book is on the slant. It leads you onwards, draws you in, down long galleries of verse, past images that shine like stained glass windows. Through section after section; doors in a house haunted by poetry: Charms, Ghosts and Hauntings, Curses, and Changelings. Poem after poem enchants, provokes, intrigues, just like the shy, uncanny creatures on the cover that crept for protection into the accepting, warm and non-judgemental wild mind of a child.

Poetry, like lightning, isn’t meant to be grounded, but an anthology like this can act as a conductor. A stroll through the index of first lines demonstrates the range of poems included, from rattling, runaway comic verse - The Resident Djinn" and Colonel Fazackerly Butterworth Toast are two characters that will stay with me forever - to this tiny, unforgettable gem (translated from a Native American language, and presented, as was sadly common at the time of publication, without context) in the voice of a ghost:

          My friend

          this is a wide world we are travelling over

          walking on the moonlight

What all these poems, regardless of form or origin, have in common is that they describe, evoke or embody the mysterious and wonderful. This is a collection that honours the strange, that is wide and unwavering of gaze. Perhaps it could only have been produced in the 1970s, and by a poet of genius – Charles Causley - who was unafraid of childhood.

When we finally closed the wardrobe door on Libya, we gave away most of our toys and packed all our favourite books in our two suitcases. At that time, due to the political situation, there were no direct flights from Libya to the UK. We landed in Malta and changed to another airline. When we took off from Malta, most of our suitcases stayed where they were, with the books inside them. I arrived in Birmingham scattered; trailing words, like feathers, across the wide blue Mediterranean. My books, gone: my world, gone. I would spend a lifetime trying to find that lost world again, seeking pieces of my childhood like Isis looking for her love, through second-hand bookshops and later, online. The Puffin Book of Magic Verse was in the one suitcase that survived the journey.

It’s hard to know, if the rest of my books had made it through, whether The Puffin Book of Magic Verse would have been so important to me. Perhaps I would have taken the presence of books for granted. As it stands, it is one of the very few things – books or otherwise - I have from my childhood. It haunts me.

When I was young, I used to like to imagine that I would be buried with my books, so we’d biodegrade together, and archaeologists of the future wouldn’t be able to tell the ink from the flesh. Now I’m older, I think that’s a bit morbid, and I know how much burial plots cost. All the same, those pages are yellow with my handling. I have put myself into that book just as it has put itself into me. Bridges and love spells may rust and crumble, but a book can go all the way with you, holding your hand.