Autumn arrival alert: the Yellow-browed Warbler has landed! 😍 Once rare, these tiny travellers from Siberia are becoming a more familiar sight as they pass through each autumn. Weighing just 6 grams, their sharp, distinctive call is usually the first clue they're around. Have you seen one?

Cyclamen

Nice essay in The Author from @rsmythfreelance.bsky.social on fiction within non-fiction. Love the first line. @societyofauthors.bsky.social

geranium petals

Rinsing plums and strawberries.

Kamila Shamsie in conversation with Sonia Faleiro. Am always fascinated by the not knowing when we write. #writing

‘I was looking for a trace, a whiff, a rumor—anything that would bring alive the greatest guitarist you’d never heard about.’ @osmansamiuddin.bsky.social writes, brilliantly, in Guernica about chasing a forgotten musical legend from Karachi. I’m proud to have edited it. www.guernicamag.com/iggy/

Sunflowers

I’ve written a long read for @tribunemagazine.bsky.social about happened with Baillie Gifford, @fossilfreebooks.org and all the festivals. A lot of fake news circulated at the time so, whatever side you came down on, I’d be grateful if you read and shared it. tribunemag.co.uk/2025/09/writ...

Always makes me smile, final scene in Zorba the Greek. youtu.be/BS0w3Wkric8?...

Ibrahim has a scholarship to study at Glasgow Uni - but he's trapped in Gaza and needs UK Government help to get out. This week Labour told the media they would bring 40 Gaza students here. Ibrahim heard the news ... then learned he wasn't one of them. www.thenational.scot/news/2542399...

Quote by American poet Christian Winman from beginning of Miriam Toews' new book A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE, a memoir on writing and grief.

Delighted that The State of Me is available in print again in UK.

Lovely to see the very fine @lighthousebks.bsky.social stocking my novel 17 years on!

Mount Sinai Creates First Manual for Treating Infection-Associated Chronic Illness for Clinicians Brilliant work - huge thanks to all involved 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 www.mountsinai.org/about/newsro...

Quite tickled by something that's a signifier of lower class households across south Asia being included in the FT's HTSI section

Every tech update now is like: "Great news, the word processor you've relied on for twenty years has learned to juggle! Is it good at it? No! Does it help in any way? Of course not! Has it made it insufferable to use? Oh, absolutely."

Hints of autumn

Louis Menand reviews new biography of James Baldwin by Nicholas Boggs in The New Yorker. The collection on Baldwin I edited last year for @writersmosaic.bsky.social is available here: writersmosaic.org.uk/content/goin...

Loved doing this.

Magpie feather, rosehips

Geranium petals, fallen on bathroom shelf

Loving novel THEORY & PRACTICE by Michelle de Kretser.

A lovely piece by Dr @binitakane.bsky.social on “Roots to Routes: why South Asian Heritage Month matters to the NHS”

Motherfucking wind farms…

A fox looks up at Ayr Baths in the early 1980’s before the flume was put in and the urban myth about someone sticking razor blades in it

Letter from @strangerandstranger.net in Times today #MEcfs #DecodeME #LongCovid

On 9 August 1945, the second—& so far, last—nuclear weapon used in war fell on Nagasaki. One of the few things to survive the bomb was a persimmon tree. In 2002, the poet Gerry Loose brought a sapling from that tree to Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens #NagasakiDay www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2015/06/trav...

just been camping for the first time in my life and i have some valuable camping advice: take everything with you. Everything in your house. Take your whole house with you and live in it. Live inside your house, at home. Stay at home, living in your house with everything in your house.

Very interesting essay on writing illness as short fiction by Edinburgh University lecturer @janealexander.bsky.social My 2008 novel is discussed. journals.openedition.org/jsse/3615?la...

London-based artist Caroline Walker focuses on“invisible” women in the UK capital’s service industries #WomensArt

Tens of thousands of cornflowers in a field in Wicken. Research shows that the sight of them will help you recover from sources of stress more quickly & boost dopamine release in your brain, lifting your mood…in case you need it just now:

So hard to snap butterflies, three small whites(?) flitting around lavender today.

Good to see mentions of @noreenmasud.bsky.social , @pollyrowena.bsky.social and @nicwilson.bsky.social . Check their books out.

Booker Prize longlist 2025: ‘alive with great characters and narrative surprises’ says chair of judges Roddy Doyle www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

Our short story prize is open for submissions again! Please share this widely - and please send us your stories: www.galleybeggar.co.uk/prize Closing date 8 November!

Wee posy of flowers

Frank Lloyd Wright, Saguaro Forms and Cactus Flowers, 1927

Poppy pod, nigella, dying acer, greenfinch

✨ FAIR is Book of the Day in The Guardian ✨ www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j... @prototypepubs.bsky.social @theguardian.com

Bullfinch #birds

‘Is this a novel of ideas, or a novel about people who like to talk about ideas? I suspect the latter.’ Ange Mlinko on Michelle de Kretser’s novel ‘Theory and Practice’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This Gaelic flash fiction is just lovely!

Armed police threatened to arrest Kent protester for holding Palestinian flag www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Attempting invisibility until at least Wednesday... #MondayMotivation

July