Blog Posts

  • All the Ps – poetry pamphlets and Poems, Prose and Pints 

    Blogging has had to move down my priority list over the last few months. I spent September and October immersed in stimulating literature festival events and delivering workshops to adults in the community as part of my role at the University of Leeds. Then I was struck with a nasty respiratory illness and laryngitis –…

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  • Open workshops, performances with music, talks and publications

    It is probably tautological to say that the life of a writer is punctuated by joys and disappointments. This summer there have been plenty of both – as you will judge from the length of this blog. There have been more rejections by publishers and a project I’ve poured a lot of love and passion…

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  • The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley

    ‘What’s this one about?’ my husband asks, gesturing at my Ipad. ‘Men having sex with mushrooms.’ This is Aliya Whiteley’s novella The Beauty. It is probably the oddest book I’ve ever read and yes, it is partly about men having sex with mushrooms. The book begins after women have been wiped out by a disease,…

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  • Han Kang, Human Acts, translated by Deborah Smith

    In 1980, students and workers in Gwangju, South Korea protested about the ‘increasingly repressive measures’ introduced by Park Chung-hee and continued by his successor Chun Doo-hwan after his death (p1). Doo-hwan shut universities, made political activities illegal and silenced the press. He then ordered his soldiers to suppress the pro-democracy uprising in as brutal a…

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