From Still City: Diary of an Invasion
Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk’s debut poetry collection in English, reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Drawing on sources including social media, news coverage, witness accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage, intercepted communication and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the shared experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “By calling it...
Too many and not enough
On 30 April 2024, the Booksellers’ Association announced Fleur Sinclair of Sevenoaks Bookshop as its new president, having served since 2020 as one of two vice-presidents. When we heard the news, we wanted to ask Fleur for an insight in how she keeps and curates her own books… Tell us about the bookshelves in your...
Look to nature
Writing fiction – especially during the early, inspiration-seeking moments – requires establishing your personal preconditions for creativity, and preparing to inhabit different states of being. Each element of the writing process has its own energy and it helps to recognise what stage you are at, and what you need to draw inspiration from to move...
One person trying to be three or four
Not many of my days are the same but the range they cycle through remains consistently varied. Let’s take a random sample, say, yesterday, and see what happened in 24 hours of my writing life… Weather: 15 degrees and torrential rain. Bondi Beach, Edge of the World. It hasn’t stopped raining for four days, the sort of water-sheets you only get...
Catskills karma
In 1973 my family spent a summer in the Catskills, upstate New York. One afternoon I peeped through the fence of our front yard as a woman with long yellow hair lay down in the middle of the road. My mother said there was a house near the river where the hippies lived. They did...
A jumble of many things
Agnes Arnold-Forster’s Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion explores what nostalgia means and how it’s defined. The book takes us through the history from when it was deemed an illness and could have you sent away to hospital, to today’s obsession with marketing nostalgia to sell products to making countries great again! This is...
The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness
THE TREE OF ECSTASY AND UNBEARABLE SADNESS is a groundbreaking, large-scale intermodal project weaving together the worlds of art, music and literature in the poignant story of one boy’s journey into mental illness. Readers and listeners are offered a mesmerising visual and auditory tour de force about beauty and resilience, society and belief, that at...
Those who serve
In a world where you could be anything, who would be a fictional servant? They fetch and carry, are paid a pittance, and they only get a half day off. It would be understandable if fictional servants just drifted in and out of rooms proffering food and drink, with hardly a thought or feeling between...
Homunculus
“Her hair was blonde, but more white-blonde than yellow, see?” Charles focuses on where the man’s shaking finger stabs the photograph. Its subject is wrapped in a red sundress with daisies vivid enough to be real raining diagonally across the fabric. Strands fly loose from her ponytail like wisps of raw cotton in the wind....
All You Have to Do Is Care
Salena Godden’s latest poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury gives an ample and elemental display of her deepest passions. Filled with the vulnerability, rage and dismay that define contemporary living, it also delivers a stirring dose of inspiration, hope and empathy. Personal and political, the subjects range from civil liberties, human rights, love and...
