Tag: Poetry
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14th January 2025 – Sarn Helen by Tom Bullough
Wales is the measure of all things in this time-shifting story of ecological change. Just as the first lockdown was beginning to lift in late summer 2020, Tom Bullough set out to walk Sarn Helen, the Roman road that once cut through Wales from Neath in the south to Caerhun in the north. It still…
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11th February 2025 – Assembly by Natasha Brown
Here is a short sharp shock of a novel about the kind of person the UK government’s recent commission on race would have wanted to profile in their report. Natasha Brown’s virtuosic debut follows a British woman who is preparing to attend a party, and who is musing about her life and her place in…
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11th March 2025 – brother. do. you. love. me. by Manni Coe and Reuben Coe
They were just five words, separated by four tiny full stops and four spaces: “brother. do. you. love. me.” But when, in November 2020, that text from Reuben Coe, who was alone in his room in a care home in Dorset, arrived on the phone of his brother Manni in Andalusia there was little else…
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8th April 2025 – The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
“It’s worse, much worse, than you think.” When Wallace-Wells published this magazine article in July 2017, little would he have known it would become the New York magazine’s most read piece. This book, with the same title, is the longplay offspring, with over a 100 pages of footnotes, it’s clearly and importantly a very well…
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13th May 2025 – Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd | A Week in Future Wales by Islwyn Ffowc Elis
Bydd honna meet-up dwyieithog, felly darllenwch pa fersiyn/au bynnag sydd orau gennych | This will be a bilingual meet-up so please read the English or Welsh version … or both! ***SAESNEG ISOD | ENGLISH BELOW*** Nofel ffuglen chwedlonol a wyddonol gan Islwyn Ffowc Elis a gyhoeddwyd gan Plaid Cymru yn 1957 yw Wythnos yng Nghymru…
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10th June 2025 – Gliff by Ali Smith
The first of two new interconnected novels from bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted author Ali Smith. A characteristically oblique and audacious tour de force revolving loosely around the concept of resistance in a dystopian society. This is the logical evolution of the world Smith presented in the seasonal quartet: of brutal detention centres in which a for-profit…
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8th July 2025 – The Silence Project by Carole Hailey – AUTHOR IN ATTENDANCE
A blazing fictional dystopia presented as memoir, Hailey’s masterly novel revolves around the relationship between teenage Emilia and her mother Rachel, whose decision to suddenly stop speaking kickstarts an all-encompassing global ‘event’. Inspired by Rachel’s example, other women join her and together they build the Community. Eight years later, Rachel and thousands of her followers…
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12th August 2025 – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
A Vietnamese-American poet’s debut mines his extraordinary family story with passion and beauty This is a letter from a son to a mother who can’t read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born. It tells of Vietnam, of the…
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14th October 2025 – The Small Hand by Susan Hill
Robert Aickman, perhaps the greatest English writer of supernatural fiction, more than once expressed the view that the ghost story as a form was analogous to poetry. What he was getting at is that it is delicate, shaded, requires a deal of sensitivity from the writer, and has many competing elements that have to be…
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10th December 2024 – And So This Is Christmas by Brian Bilston
It’s that time of year again . . . With his signature wit, Brian Bilston returns with And So This is Christmas, fifty-one poems in celebration of the festive season: from bizarre family traditions to the office Christmas party; from voting day for turkeys to the impossible art of gift-giving. So hang your stockings, grab your…
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8th August 2023 – The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta
‘I loved every word’ – Malorie Blackman ‘Atta’s bold verse novel calls to its readers to find their own blazing, performative inner truth’ – Guardian WINNER OF THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD A boy comes to terms with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen – then at university he finds his wings as a drag…
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8pm, 12th Oct 2021 – Poor by Caleb Femi
What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because ‘you fit the description of a man’ – and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of…
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