Save the date! Submissions open for HOWL New Irish Writing 26 in February 2026 🐺 🖤

Because saw beats *checks notes* fire.

Practised my own version of the Verfremdungseffekt by reading Brecht and Method at a soft-play party rather than talk to the other parents.

Oh cool, it looks a bit like a skeleton breakdancing. That's fun, right?

We're launching a really exciting new MSt in Creative Translation - details here. Oxford has a wealth of brilliant translator energy and I am excited to see what will come out of this. Please forward to likely sorts! www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/news/2025/11...

I’m delighted to announce that my debut poetry collection, ‘The Way the Water Held Me’, will be published by The Emma Press in the Spring. Available to pre-order now!

In one of life's odd coincidences I was researching 18th / 19th Century LGBTQ women poets for a Poetry School course and decided to write a poem for Amy Levy who I had only then stumbled across for the first time.

For the haters who say Big Fiction over-relies on allegory, my most explicit, spirited defense of allegorical interpretation. "Sociology and Allegory," published as part of a series on the sociology of literature in IASL. Lemme know if you want a PDF www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

This is the writing workshop I have run with three friends since 2018; we are always open to new members and if you're scribbling away in isolation in southeast London knock that off and come scribble away with us!

Which averages out to more than one per member.

“The Brothers Karamazov” asks what we are living for, and it “seeks the answer in the little life, among the small people, in the frail, the fragile, the fallible, the failed,” Karl Ove Knausgaard writes. http://nyer.cm/za7cz5U

Ah, so OPC actually stands for Office of the Pet Counsel

Submission Call now open! Poetry Required!

Good morning, mystery garden cat.

The Disturbing Profane: Hip-Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred Hip-hop isn’t a threat to holiness — it’s a witness to survival. Joseph R. Winters’ "The Disturbing Profane" reframes the sacred through Black art and expression. Jordan Burton offers a review. @dukepress.bsky.social

Are you an early career humanities scholar looking for next year's plans? Have you dreamed of having an office only a few doors down from mine? Great news - the Whitney Humanities Center is hiring a postdoc working within the broader theme of 'Rot: Politics, Aesthetics, Regeneration'

"Bond" is actually a composite of formulae composed and sung by middle-aged aoidoi. An illusion of coherence may emerge, but only long after the original sources are lost.

Imagine praising a book in 2025 for being "sparse"? Look I enjoy sparse prose as much as the next, but we've been in a decades long Sparse Race of prose that you can increasingly just inhale like a delicate mousse and at some stage we will have to start making adjectives cool again

Remarkably, it is perfectly possible to write evocatively *and* be an incorrigible misogynist and narcissist. www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fi...

Sunday afternoon is one of the main chore times in our house, and I've just had to coin the term "laundry priapism" for a pile that, despite incessant folding, will not go down.

Maybe it's normal for two adults, two kids, but it really seems like we get through a box of 12 eggs astonishingly quickly in my house.

Here's another thread of great starter packs. Starting with one of @janejohnsonbakrim.bsky.social's excellent packs, a British Book Scene starter pack. Please follow and repost if you can #booksky #writingcommunity

Actually, Mr. Potato Head was the name of the inventor

Finally someone focused on the issues that matter.

We've finished spotlighting the poets in our new issue! Read the whole thing here badlilies.uk/issue-twenty-two

There is a child of, I'd guess, nine at the fireworks display who's wearing an extremely stylish grey herringbone greatcoat.

Thursday 20th November at the Poetry Society in Covent Garden. Four fine authors and myself together for the first time, bringing you some beneficial shocks. Free, but you have to register here: www.eventbrite.com/e/more-abund...

Is it only limited to penguins?

Buses only adopt this defensive posture when they perceive a threat.

Some thought provoking advice from Charles Baudelaire "Be Drunk” (Enivrez-vous) Be drunk, be continually drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue... #poetry #poemoftheday

Come on, mes amis, with a bit of ingenuity in the budget lines you could have classed security as performance art and vice versa. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Oh so you can outrun (or outwalk) at least some problems?

Saw it written and I saw it say Beaver moon is on its way

Delighted to have a poem in the new issue of The Interpreter's House alongside @calebparkinpoet.bsky.social and @moette.bsky.social! My piece 'Fourpence', narrated by the women of Whitechapel during the time of Jack the Ripper, can be read here: theinterpretershouse.org/hainsworth-84

I have a ticket for the sold-out Tortoise gig at Barbican on 22nd November and I can't make it. Would anybody like the ticket? I paid around £47, but I would accept whatever you can afford.

As my daughter has just enthusiastically informed me: Remember, remember The fifth of November Gunpowder, treacle, and plot

I can hear the frenetic shushing of garden Catherine wheels.

Just sharing this for no reason music.youtube.com/watch?v=6I_r...

🧵This week @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social published my review of OpenAI’s “metafictional literary story about AI and grief,” which Sam Altman claimed “got the vibe of metafiction just right.” My piece challenges this claim. 1/ lareviewofbooks.org/article/lite...

Too many classical references is Oresteia-some.

There's something semantically odd about the phrase "necessary choices."

Call for roundtable participants for BAAS 2026! If you are interested in joining a session on American Studies at post-92 / ‘modern’ universities, please see:

This will always be legal

Hi friends - I'm Featured Poet on the new @interpretershouse, with three poems & an introductory essay to them: theinterpretershouse.org/parkin-84 They're PhD work: one of my jay poems & two from my travels last year 🐦 🚢 🐻

Youngest has decided to do an impromptu reenactment of the June Days uprising.

Extracting the marrow from the bones of my defeated enemies #gnawvember

Spem in alium numquam habui praeter in te deus Israel. I’ve never put hope in any but Thee God of Israel. Tallis’s 40-part motet Spem in alium almost convinces me to put my hope there too. Almost. But… Peter Phillips and the Tallis Scholars here perform one of the masterpieces of English polyphony

Happy All Souls day from Paul Celan (trans. by Michael Hamburger)

New poetry magazine just dropped from a former student of mine - open to submissions & free if you’re interested www.stoatmagazine.co.uk

'Pacific Swift' by @stoneandthestar.bsky.social badlilies.uk/clarissa-aykroyd-1