"He took out his tobacco and began to build a cigarette, watching past the flare of the match sleeping houses streaking past like islands afloat in the moving sea of night, the train’s speed increasing, so that he was caught in a rising ti..." -- Provinces of Night: A Novel, William Gay #reading

Writers and book designers, how can you encourage me to buy your book? Maps. The answer is always maps. Look at this beauty from Jane Rogoyska - Exile Hotel pub by Allen Lane

Hearing a lecture on Edwin Morgan's Pilate at Fortingall in 1998 was one of the clearest memories I have of falling in love with Scottish literature.

I was on the @rteone.rte.ie show Arena last night, chatting with Ciara King about Communion. It was my first experience on live radio, but it meant a lot to spread the word across the sea to Ireland.

Damp here

'As you slog along these forestry tracks, that fine balance between mind and world gets disturbed. Faced with an unceasing line of trees, and lacking the longer views that the eye desires, your mind turns in upon itself, and gloomy, existential questions start to loom.' gwallter.com/travel/st-il...

Thank you @brettpribble.bsky.social at Ghost Parachute, for publishing my little/big story.

The #swallows have returned to #Wales! Now reported on #socialmedia but once annually recorded in the #newspaper - especially when they were as thick "as flies on a fly paper" on the bridges of #Aberystwyth - from Cambrian News & Merionethshire Standard, 27 April 1900 #BirdingWales #envhist #nature

The face of poverty ~ a child’s “shoe doll”, found in a London slum in 1905, made from fabric scraps, the heel of a man’s shoe and a black sock (Museum of Childhood, Edinburgh)

Larks they were in lift-off, swallows in soaring. Soaring metal is flight and nest together… —Edwin Morgan, “A Home in Space” published in CENTENARY SELECTED POEMS, @carcanet.bsky.social 2020 #poem #poetry #Artemis www.carcanet.co.uk/978178410996...

A choir singing Handel in the cavity of a yew tree

New Gwendoline Riley The Palm House out tomorrow 2 April TBH it only has to be half as good as My Phantoms to be fucking great

A good day to read "April Fish" - a cutting little story from Mavis Gallant - but she is never simply vicious - instructive to see how she has her narrator condemn herself but also works in some sympathy www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

New Gwendoline Riley The Palm House out tomorrow 2 April TBH it only has to be half as good as My Phantoms to be fucking great

A good day to read "April Fish" - a cutting little story from Mavis Gallant - but she is never simply vicious - instructive to see how she has her narrator condemn herself but also works in some sympathy www.newyorker.com/magazine/196...

Here's a George Dillon sonnet, a favourite of mine - maybe he was too fluent, but sometimes going with the flow can work.

Join us later this month for 'Rodeo Odes', a unique, interactive event exploring the links between poetry and equestrianism, with peripatetic readings ​f​rom Longbarrow poets mounted on hobby horses​. Pontefract Racecourse, 6.30am, Friday 31 April.

Rare Andy Goldsworthy self-portrait found.

does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.

A song made from a little-known Dylan poem about Lake Superior. Wait, %#@ Apple screen keyboard—a Dillon poem—George Dillon. Won a Pulitzer, long-time Poetry editor, slept with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a thimbleberry connoisseur, but forgotten. There’s a law, Donald Hall’s Law. Read/hear here:

Manchester & Salford, April 1st 2026 First Light: 05.24 Sunrise: 06.42 Sunset: 19.44 Nightfall: 21.03 White Rabbits. From tomorrow I will exclusively be photographing at the brightest point of the day. Not Quite Lunchtime is the new name of this project.

People love to assume new technology must be an improvement for all possible uses. That's rarely the case. AI is great at pumping out mediocre text in large quantities. That is excellent for certain things (spam emails, clickbait web copy, etc.). Novelists and publishers rarely need more quantity.

A short story I put out into the world a while back just keeps on going and going, cropping up in the strangest of places and living its best life…

If any of you were wondering what Charlie Jellicoe’s been up to since The Peckham Experiment, here’s your chance to find out

‘Hope, insight and burning humanity’: 2026 International Booker prize shortlist announced

Join me online between 6pm and 8pm on a Thursday evening for 11 weeks to explore ways of bringing true stories vividly alive. Creative Nonfiction at City Lit: biography, memoir, personal essays. Research can be part of the story. www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/writ...

If you have JSTOR access you can read my story 'The Happy People' from @agnimagazine.bsky.social www.jstor.org/stable/27301...

🤩 I'm honoured to have my short story "Gate" in Coppernickel's latest, Issue No.42 (University of Colorado) 🚪💧 Cover, and last page of story:

Reason and Passion - existentialcomics.com/comic/648

Ramsons (Allium ursinum, or its Irish name: Creamh) in bloom ( and in scent!) under the shade of a tree in Co. Limerick yesterday for #WildflowerHour

A Kansas publishing house sold 300 MILLION affordable books during the Depression. Here are a few

Having now read 10 of the 13 books on the International Booker prize long list, this would be my shortlist, with The Remembered Soldier likely to be there too.

David Gutowksi has been asking writers about music and musicians about writing for a long time over at Largehearted Boy. I was very happy to contribute. You can listen to my playlist for Trouble and read about my choices here: largeheartedboy.com/2026/03/29/e...

History in rough shape Emma Lew, ‘Sugared Path’

What a lovely, loving story this is. Like if Orlando were set at the Jersey Shore. "Lanternfly," by @emmaceisenberg.bsky.social, at @yalereview.bsky.social. From her new story collection, "Fat Swim." yalereview.org/article/emma...

A spring story with interview from late last year 🌸🌺🌷

Listen now to my chat with Yann Martel on BBC R4 about new @canongate.co.uk novel SON OF NOBODY and his 3 influences: Homer's Iliad (as translated by Stephen Mitchell), Alice Oswald's poem Memorial & Edward Albee's classic 1960s play. From the Trojan War to marital war! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Blackthorn in the midst of peak flowering in the hedgerows at the moment with us #WildflowerHour nearly a #TreeFlowers

I'm guessing this is spotted medick just coming out from under its spotty / heart splodged blankets. #WildflowerHour

The strangeness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the strange is the world of Ben Pester’s forthcoming collection ’Sail Away Land’. Told with a singular, uncanny apprehension and density of feeling these stories are superbly unsettling and compelling. Published June @grantabooks.bsky.social.

We're celebrating one of the first identifiable composers this week @BBCRadio3 - C12th polymath Hildegard of Bingen. Each day at 4pm in Composer of the Week with Donald Macleod And at 21.45 Juliet Stevenson plays #Hildegard in a new drama series by Anna Linstrum www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/.... Evening stroll soundtrack 2: this moving story of the body, and memory, and love @bbcsounds.bsky.social

At #nokings Palo Alto today: Ode to Joy, played at a flash concert.

I have forgotten the name of this variety so now I just call them the beautiful parrots

Sharing this @thomasha.bsky.social story because I love it & because it's a good story to read for #NoKings clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha_04_25

‘Legion’ (work in progress) A0 watercolour. After months, nearly a year, of stalling on A Lincolnshire Bible, my ambitious project weaving together the threads of this county’s spiritual and artistic heritage, the paralysis has finally broken.

If you should ever get the chance, twenty-five years after you first read it, to read A Perfect Day For Bananafish with a class of students, boy, you are in for a treat. Still a perfect, perfect short story.

I think I would be happy with Women Without Men winning the International Booker for this reason alone.