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upcoming events
7th October - Durham Book Festival A work-in-progress sharing of Hayling Island - stories at sea level. 5pm at Empty Shop TESTT Space in Durham - click here to buy tickets for £6 or £4 8th October - Manchester Literature Festival Protest! Stories of Resistance event, with Kit De Waal, Courttia Newland and myself reading from the new Comma Press anthology of fiction and historical analysis on Britain's (sometimes forgotten) protest movements. With the incomparable Maxine Peake as our host! At the Dancehouse - tickets for this event are now sold out. 21st October - Hayling Island Library A work-in-progress sharing of Hayling Island - stories at sea level. 2pm at Hayling library. Click here for a free ticket! 26th October - Manchester A work-in-progress sharing of Hayling Island - stories at sea level. 8pm at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Click here for a free ticket! 30th October - Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham Protest! Stories of Resistance event, with Andy Hedgecock and myself reading from the new Comma Press anthology, and Ra Page on fighting Fake News with well-researched, historically accurate fiction. Starts at 7pm - click here to buy tickets for £3 |
about
I'm a British-Canadian writer and spoken word artist. I've performed at many festivals and live events across the UK and beyond, solo and in collaboration with other writers, musicians and visual/digital artists. I have most recently written for the new Comma Press anthology Protest! Stories of Resistance, looking at working class suffragettes and forced feeding. My short fiction has featured on BBC Radio 4, in Short Fiction Journal, and in the literary mapping app LitNav, with poetry appearing in numerous anthologies, including the recent Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and disabled poets write back, the UK’s first anthology of poetry, essays, films and photography of its kind, from Nine Arches Press. My short story collection, Jebel Marra (Comma Press, 2015), was nominated for a number of national and international awards, and I am now working on my second collection, an audio and digital short story map of Hayling Island. Find me online at:
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news
'Hayling Island - stories at sea level' - a digital audio map of short stories
I'm currently writing a new collection of short stories to be published as a digital audio map. Working in collaboration with composer and sound designer Caro C, digital artist (among many other things) Maya Chowdhry, and literary geographer Dr David Cooper, we are drawing on memory, experience, and geography to create a map of fictional stories set on Hayling, a small island off the south coast of England, in Hampshire. Exploring economic shift, climate change, and the ways we map our lives, the stories will focus largely on those who live at the water's edge: the skint, the canny, the ill, the queer - the people who face the wind and build lives on hope, grit and shingle. I was born on Hayling, and was two when my parents left, so part of this collection is informed by that experience of carrying borrowed memories, mapping stories of the arcades, bingos, cafes and clubs my family ran in the 70s, just as the arrival of package holidays was starting to take its toll.
We will be presenting work-in-progress live events this October, in Hayling, Manchester and Durham, sharing a little of the fiction, sound, and maps as we create. This project is made possible by the generous support of Arts Council England and New Writing North, and we work in collaboration with Comma Press and their wonderful wordy jukebox, MacGuffin. See below for events, and check out the press page if you want the whys and the whatnots.
I'm currently writing a new collection of short stories to be published as a digital audio map. Working in collaboration with composer and sound designer Caro C, digital artist (among many other things) Maya Chowdhry, and literary geographer Dr David Cooper, we are drawing on memory, experience, and geography to create a map of fictional stories set on Hayling, a small island off the south coast of England, in Hampshire. Exploring economic shift, climate change, and the ways we map our lives, the stories will focus largely on those who live at the water's edge: the skint, the canny, the ill, the queer - the people who face the wind and build lives on hope, grit and shingle. I was born on Hayling, and was two when my parents left, so part of this collection is informed by that experience of carrying borrowed memories, mapping stories of the arcades, bingos, cafes and clubs my family ran in the 70s, just as the arrival of package holidays was starting to take its toll.
We will be presenting work-in-progress live events this October, in Hayling, Manchester and Durham, sharing a little of the fiction, sound, and maps as we create. This project is made possible by the generous support of Arts Council England and New Writing North, and we work in collaboration with Comma Press and their wonderful wordy jukebox, MacGuffin. See below for events, and check out the press page if you want the whys and the whatnots.
