Blog Posts

  • Guest, S. J.Bradley

    Guest is the ironic title of this coming of age novel about a young man who squats in a former hotel. The title calls to mind the uninvited wedding guest or one of the absent friends and relatives your mother might raise a glass to at Christmas meals. Who is the guest here? Is it…

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  • Labelling Writers and Writing Labels

    There was a huge furore in the poetry world last week begun by Rebecca Watts’s article criticising what she refers to as ‘amateur’ spoken word poetry and three of its most successful artists – Holly McNish, Rupi Kaur and Kate Tempest. Part of the scandal was down to the personal, and arguably unkind, tone of…

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  • Herself Alone In Orange Rain, Tracey Iceton

    Picture a member of the Provisional IRA and you won’t be alone in imagining a balaclava-clad man in his twenties or thirties. Think again. ‘Official numbers are small but unconfirmed accounts report a 50-50 male-female attendance at IRA training camps,’ Iceton tells us in the author’s note of Herself Alone in Orange Rain. Women were…

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  • Changing Diaries

    If you switch off when writers start talking about how they fill their diaries then do click off the screen now. If you’re still here – hello and happy New Year! I’m going to start by returning to 2016. With regards to writing, that year was an exciting one for me. There was the release…

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