Kirsten Glass’ enchanting paintings conjure alternate realms, invoke esoteric energies and summon nocturnal beings. In this creative essay, Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou meditates on the “obverse” side of her mesmerising work and its magical channeling of all things dark.
Heavy with heartache and loss, Lisa Goodrum turned to the haunting photography of Francesca Woodman to make sense of the pain and the blurry, achromatic period that was the summer of 2019. Here, in hauntingly beautiful prose, she tells her story.
Rachel Ashenden talks to artist Nell Brookfield about how her evocative paintings’ capture the strange in the quotidian and unleash the animalistic in the human.
Peaches and pigs, softness and hunger, all crop up and are used to explore women’s relationships to their bodies in Cecilia Knapp’s raw and remarkable collection, Peach Pig, writes our contributor Seraphina Edelmann.
Iona Glen meets award-winning poet, Polly Atkin, to discuss her recent biography Recovering Dorothy, how Dorothy Wordsworth’s illness has been overlooked in academic scholarship, the marginalisation of those with chronic ill health, poems as time machines and much more.
Claudia Durastanti’s luminous novel, Strangers I Know, traverses multiple identities, migrations and languages, and considers how ‘art can free an individual from difference, and difference from solitude’, writes Vartika Rastogi.
For her fifth dinner party, author and host Susanna Crossman talks to writers Elizabeth Chakrabarty, Lily Dunn and Shamini Sriskandarajah about eliding the barriers between fiction and non-fiction, the ethics of (memoir) writing, diverse ways of reading via Lydia Davis and whether to “glam up” or dress down when sitting down to write.
Family ties are challenged and remade during politically divisive and tumultuous times in Véronique Olmi’s intimate and brilliantly written novel, Daughters Beyond Command.
Acclaimed author Savala Nolan talks to Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou about her latest collection of essays, Don’t Let It Get You Down (The Indigo Press), navigating interstitial spaces and identities, the ubiquity of violence to women, imagination as a vital tool to access African American history and life writing as a form of cartography for readers.
Vigdis Hjorth’s novel, Is Mother Dead, translated by Charlotte Barslund, interrogates the cultural expectations placed on ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, and offers a stark and powerful addition to the growing body of ‘motherhood’ texts, writes Kathryn Cutler-MacKenzie.
Naomi Booth’s short story collection delves into the nocturnal happenings of both animals and humans, revealing worlds that are closely intertwined in all the beauty, ugliness, and honesty of nature.
