Every Sunday I’ll be contributing a paperback column to the Observer’s New Review. Kicking things off is Driver by Mattia Filice (@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social), who’s poured his experience of 2 decades working on the French rail network into an extraordinary verse novel. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Please direct me to your favourite braided essays. Cheers. #WritingCommunity

Join us for the online launch of the #CuraePrize anthology from @renardpress.com! The Curae Prize is a literary award for unpaid carers. Expect fresh, vibrant fiction, nonfiction & poetry. 📆 12 November 2025, 6pm 🎟️ www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-curae-... (free) #writingcommunity #writersky #carers

Thanks to all those who joined us yesterday evening for the relaunch of The Barbellion Prize, a book prize for chronically ill and disabled authors founded by @jgoldsmith.bsky.social. Our generous audience raised more than £400 on the night! You can donate here: barbellionprize.org/donate/

The Curae II available for pre-order from @renardpress.com! 💚 Intro by @bookwormvaught.bsky.social. 💚 And a piece about dead butterfly epiphanies and metamorphosis by me. 🛒 renardpress.com/books/the-cu... 💚 All proceeds to Carers Trust & Carers UK.

The cover has landed for the 2nd #CuraePrize anthology. A selection of fiction, nonfiction & poetry written by unpaid carers, a strangely marginalised group. It’s rare that our voices are amplified, but we’re here holding up our loved ones & growing in unexpected ways. Out 15/11. @renardpress.com

Day 1 of #NottingHillCarnival ✅

Thought this was well-articulated, on the appeal of Trump to the unconscious - from Maggie Nelson’s “Like Love”.

#CrispWall update. Note heart cut outs.

My youngest and I do quite a lot of escape rooms together as a duo and I have been trying to understand the appeal. For me, I think it’s just looking through other people’s drawers.

Today I saw the bus that is my mental image of a bus when I think the word “bus”. Looks like a seven year old’s drawing. I love it.

Took my transport enthusiast autistic son to Battersea bus garage to contemplate some of his favourite units through the fence. Had a lovely chat with a driver who has an 8yo autistic son. I love that sense of “game recognises game” when parent/carers meet. A shortcut from stranger to friend.

Excitingly, the winning & shortlisted (🙋‍♀️) entries for the #Curae Prize will be published in an anthology by lovely @renardpress.com later in the year. For an emerging (but wizened) writer, this feels like getting off the mark. And doing it with a cohort of fellow carer-writers is really meaningful.

Congratulations to the #Curae Prize winners 2025! What a joy it has been to be a part of all this. Can’t wait to read all the winning and shortlisted entries.📚📚📚

I’ve had a lot of correspondence today about the #Curae I had mentioned that it might not run again and had noted, first and foremost, that demands on me are high. It’s really worth explaining. I have done as much as it possibly can but I don’t think my position is clear so I thought I’d state it ❤️

I’m coming to the end of a Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck & have hugely benefited from the structure and content of it. Funding for a carer to attend a Creative Writing course could be just what they need to keep writing. Please consider supporting @bookwormvaught.bsky.social’s #Curae scholarship.

Quite proud of my ‘hood’s efforts (this is outside the Russian embassy in London), but Prague…👏👏👏

Honoured, surprised and perplexed to find my name on the nonfiction category shortlist for the #Curae prize. Thank you, judges! Congratulations, fellow shortlistees!🎉

We're giving away this VANISHING WORLD goodie bag to a lucky winner on both Bluesky and Instagram 🍎 To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is: - Follow @grantabooks.bsky.social - Repost - Leave a comment tagging a friend (more tags = more entries) - Enter by 2 May See below for T+Cs.

Was feeling this grey Mondayish Monday in my bones but then suddenly thought about how it isn’t Christmas and won’t be for ages. Feel MUCH better now.

I am so, so tired. And I know you are, too. Here's “Death blowing bubbles,” 18th century. The bubbles symbolize life's fragility. This plaster work appears on the ceiling of Holy Grave Chapel in Michaelsberg Abbey, Bamberg, Germany. After the monastery’s dissolution, it became a hospital.

The library?

More ✨glamorous✨ bus quests with the bigger boy this weekend.

Thought this was a good and important article by @johnharris1969.bsky.social Hope it gets read. Where are the disabled adults in your groups / classes / nights’ out? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Don’t mean to be a curmudgeon but I’m glad that’s over.

Thanks, @biggreenbooks.bsky.social for so generously ensuring we get our book chat! 💚

New Year Socks: knitted. (Yarn = Trailing Cloud’s “Mind the Gap”. London Underground line colours ftw).

It feels more important than ever to ensure that the stories of refugees are being heard. THE ENDLESS SEA is a very special story about a Vietnamese family’s search for sanctuary. Moving, lyrical and beautiful illustrated. Available to pre-order from the usual places. #kidlit

How did you spend your #StormDarragh? I was mainly on an industrial estate in West Ham.

One of my favourite pieces of boardgame research is a paper called 'Pig Data & Bayesian Inference on Multinomial Probabilities', published in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education. I was shocked by some of its findings. Let's dive in. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Still trying to find all the great comedy / train / mudlarking / writing / autistic / crafty / book-reading mother weirdos I followed on Twitter. I like my feed eclectic.

It's stormy outside, which can mean only one thing... BIG JET TV live broadcasting from Heathrow Airport. 2pm today www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNk0...

I came to this gem knowing nothing about it except that I would read Max Porter’s shopping list. I knew from the first handful of words that it was written to be spoken out loud. A glorious ranging and heartfelt apology. Save it for when you need a poetic moment. #booksky

My 12yo is a foodie and watches loads of cooking videos on YouTube. This is beginning to reap dividends. Dinner last night was spaghetti all’assassina (pasta cooked in tomato sauce via the absorption method until a bit crispy) and burrata. I buy, he cooks. Sweet deal if you ask me.

We need to remember that SEN is a policy framework devised by the Govt If SEN is a problem, it’s one of the Govt’s own making If ~30% of kids need something that is ‘additional to and different from’ that which is typically provided, perhaps we need to start thinking more about typical provision?

Not reading a DM article but I hope by “war on benefits” Starmer means a war on the cruel, inefficient and inconsistent systems through which they are delivered and not a war on claimants.

One of my children woke me with a coffee they had made, unprompted. It felt vaguely miraculous. Somehow I have raised a human child to the point where they can perform such kindnesses.

On the 1st of January, the #Curae prize for writer-carers opens for a second time. The demise of twitter is making it harder to get the word out, so do share! thecuraeprize.uk There are around 7 million unpaid carers in the UK alone & Curae shines a light on the role & much more. #carers #writing

Well, instabuy, because this sounds positively delightful.

If the sun was a bloom. Sharing this aggressively cheerful sight on a dour November day.

On the upside, my local corner shop (actually on a corner) has the most beautiful crisp wall. Perfectly tessellated, floor to ceiling. I can go and look at it and feel that there is peace and order in the world.

I was lucky enough to see the London premiere of The Stimming Pool last month, and it's really amazing. You can see it in cinemas from 28 March 2025. Directed by a collective of ND filmmakers including my friend Sam (doesn't do social media!) who explains more here: www.channel4.com/news/the-sti...

Ah, the administrative joys of being a parent/carer. A Sunday evening spent filling in hefty forms detailing the ways in which my child is not like other children, but also failing to capture anything important about him.

Trying to write about what I’ve noticed chaperoning my autistic son in public - particularly in relation to staring. Garland-Thomson’s “Staring: How we Look” is so good on this. Love it when I find a book that gives full flight to the fledgling thoughts that have been flitting around my brain.