“Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt.” www.theguardian.com/film/2025/de...

As of course it should be! 🎄

Anthropocene Affordances is now out in the world!🌎 I’m proud (and very excited!) to share that my dissertation Anthropocene Affordances has just been published in the Literary Ecologies series at @transcript-verlag.bsky.social.💡 Check out the book here: www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7....

Universities: investing millions so students ”develop literacy in the language of AI” Also universities: defunding the humanities so students are illiterate in ordinary languages

An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.

A first look at our new series design for Fictional Objects! Common by Nikolai Duffy follows its main character as he comes to terms with the circumstances of his life - a reflection on solitude, freedom, responsibility, and the repeated attempt to transcend the legacies of the past.

Brave New HE www.theguardian.com/education/20...

"Denial is not an idiosyncracy or private pathology, but a certificate of membership in this particular society, a kind of credit card necessary for moving around in it and accessing its commodities and living without going nuts" - Prof. Andreas Malm youtu.be/fVYO7w6UHi8

Autumn colours 🍁

Blown over (!) by HELM. (Porter’s is next.) I love this Prize which rediscovers the novel afresh every year.

I “migrated” to this slightly offshore country 35 years ago today — one day before German Reunification, which I watched on TV in a bedsit on Glasgow’s Great Western Road. I remember my mouth being sore from speaking English all day 😂

Marnie, optimising summer’s long goodbye

'A poet's death fills other poets with dread.' Harrison was on roaring form here. www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/feb/...

Cookie politics

Never read anything by Pym before: is this what’s meant by “middle brow”?!

We’ve renamed the house in honour of these two blue wonders 🤩🥰❤️

Wrote about this over 25 years ago & it continues to be one of my absolute favourite Bildungsroman novels journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Mount Fuji, on arrival

'If you're experimenting with things, you're always writing against the culture' Goldsmiths Prize 2017 winner Nicola Barker talks to @tanjilrashid.bsky.social about piecing the novel back together again after H(A)PPY, and much else . . . podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

Whixall (May 2020)

"Can I read you some of my poetry?"

In the spirit of syllabus season, here’s a link to an extinction studies course of the #envhist #envhum variety. From the dodo to dire wolves...Please borrow, adapt, share! drive.google.com/file/d/1SzKp... cc: @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social!

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a... “A rollercoaster kind of excess” — hugely looking forward to this when it comes out next week. About time too: it’s been a while since the last Nicola Barker novel!

A radical new take by @angelariviz.bsky.social on “the green man” and British men’s writing in the Anthropocene, envisioning futures “in which masculinities may rot, sprout, and become otherwise” doi.org/10.1080/0011...

a decade ago poet Angela Rawlings had an idea: Snæfellsjökull glacier for president of Iceland. now that idea has snowballed into a full-blown campaign with a team of 50 people www.theguardian.com/world/2024/a...

Aberffraw Beach at dawn

Ted Hughes in a letter to his son: “Behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim.”

After the latest round of grading papers, I wrote about AI, ChatGPT, the death of the student essay, and what it means for the future of human cognition.

University gen AI training is presented as addressing a deficit in us. Staff and students need to be taught how to use it ethically and responsibly. But the problem is with the technology itself. It’s inherently unethical and irresponsible: extractive, imperialistic, delusional, and unsustainable.

𝐄𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐀𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝. New resource! We have just launched out new #EnvHist map as a contribution to connecting scholar across the globe. It is a work in progress and will be expanded. www.iceho.org/eh-around-th... We hope you will find it useful!

Nothing at all about Marina Kemp’s The Unwilding on Bluesky?!! Her writing is just exquisite. I’m onto her award-winning debut [Nightingale] next, which somehow I must have missed. www.theguardian.com/books/articl...

Theory & Practice wasn’t like anything I’d read before. It took me back to my own first puzzling encounters with Grand Theory in the 1980s. I also liked the narrator’s obsessive & deeply conflicted conjuring of the omnipresent Woolfmother www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

An essay defending negative book reviews. I think there should be more of them: they can help other writers much more than positive reviews. jameselkins.substack.com/p/in-defense...

Posting this before the pleasure of a new publication turns to shame and embarrassment about its inadeqacies. My article '"Bullshit" Jobs and Ticklish Comedy: Humor and Sadness in the Contemporary Workplace Novel' is out now in _Contemporary Literature_ cl.uwpress.org/content/65/2....

Marnie and the Box (2021)

Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897) was born #OTD, 4 April – a 🎂 🧵 “surely the most interesting and entertaining example of a woman writing about men in the nineteenth century” —Tom Crewe in the @lrb.co.uk on Margaret Oliphant’s 1866 novel MISS MARJORIBANKS 1/7 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I can’t resist a good family saga. Lombardo does them exceptionally well. I’m already looking forward to her next.

Professor Michael Pinchbeck is an affiliate member of the Centre for Place Writing, currently working on this project 'Talking Trees', with developments underway with Ningbo, China. #PlaceWriting #audiolandscapes ahead.mmu.ac.uk/2024/06/11/t...

The Books of White Lotus www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

NOW OUT! Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities, ed. by me, @mariettarosetta.bsky.social, and Donna McCormack. @edinburghup.bsky.social @durhamimh.bsky.social @the-polyphony.bsky.social tinyurl.com/5f6x94se

The Climate Fiction Prize’s first-ever longlist is here! The globe-spanning, all-female longlist offers a unique collection of narratives, styles and genres, showcasing the stellar array of novels being written in the climate fiction space. climatefictionprize.co.uk

SCOTTISH LITERARY REVIEW 16/1 Special issue: “Queer Form” ed Zoë Strachan & Darryl Peers Free on Open Access via Project MUSE Articles on: JM Barrie & Compton Mackenzie Ali Smith Queer Landscapes Shola von Reinhold Queer Scottish Form Callie Gardner Maud Sulter Edwin Morgan muse.jhu.edu/issue/51852

Edward Berger’s Conclave — such superb acting and sumptuous cinematography! Who cares if it’s not entirely true to life?! (If only it were …!)

Looks like spring

Segregation at Shugborough Hall

“February” by Margaret Atwood ——

Coffeehouse Girls!

“The Trees | are probably the largest selves in the forest […]” from the Australian poet Stuart Cooke’s recent collection The grass is greener over your grave (2023)