The Taylor/Travis wedding has made me think of the polar opposite, Alan Bennett's parents. His mother was painfully shy, so his father asked the vicar if they could get married first thing, before work: no congregation, no fuss, no 'splother'. The vicar had to jump through hoops to make it happen

I have a story in Radio 4's new Once Upon a Time series - a week of reimagined fairytales in the Book at Bedtime slot Lineup includes Katherine Rundell, Ben Okri, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, and David Almond (I KNOW!!!) My story "Kakapos" is on 30 June and then on catchup www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Happy solstice! Here is the kind of luck I have—Emily Hancock of @stbrigidpress.bsky.social has made my poem “One Lightning Bug,” from Might Could, into a tiny letterpress-printed pamphlet. Emily showed me that the cover does this!

I make (amongst other things) one-off ceramic bells. Bells are for summoning - a call, a reminder, a wakening. They connect with others, set an intention, or request attention. I like them because they combine functionality and ritual. www.seventysevenseas.co.uk

Pity the poor debut novelist: Elizabeth Taylor, born OTD in 1912 (from her novel Angel)

Wonderful to see my story up on Minor Literature[s] today! Hope you enjoy it!

a story that's both big and small at once, my favourite kind.

The Road Trip Movie We Didn’t Know We Needed & We All Deserve As A Little Treat @markhamillofficial.bsky.social to voice the skull

Brief, bleak, cinematic: probably facile to draw attention to the author's screenwriting background, but it shows (and not in a bad this-was-written-to-be-a-movie way). Justice as a self-perpetuating machine, eating everyone who falls in; Brazil's brutal history; men with guns and nothing to lose.

Today, for no special reason, I started a Substack, at the risk of being ahead of the publishing curve once again. You can read a piece I wrote about online dating in Kyrgyzstan when that was also still a thing that seemed good. open.substack.com/pub/nickhold...

I love these

This is good @lrb.co.uk @aestallings.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

My first short story collection comes out September 8th. It's the book that's taken me the longest to write (lol I wrote the first draft of one of these stories in 2010) and is filled with ghosts, dystopias, Black women trying to figure out how to make art, & the unknown: lithub.com/lit-hubs-mos...

Part III in my little series on plotting and planning countercraft.substack.com/p/principles...

Deep In The Wheat Triptych South Downs National Park, Hampshire UK #Photography #ClassicMono #Scape #EastCoastKin #ShotOnFairphone

The sad echo of the wood doves. The rain-lashed, disjointed flight of birds in the skeleton light of fireflies like clouds of grasshoppers. The unrequited howling of coyotes. The calls of nightjars drilling the air. Hares bounding. Deer like lunar sawdust in the fragile light. - Asturias

A rare #butterfly visitor to our garden this afternoon: White-letter Hairstreak. Stayed for 45 minutes on the one flower head, feeding on nectar even during persistent drizzle. #SaveButterflies #Lancaster

Fairy Tales: the stories that shape us. Mythologist, writer & storyteller Martin Shaw talks to Sian Williams about the enduring power - and usefulness of these stories in an age of disinformation. 9.30pm Tues 30 Jun @BBCRadio4 or listen @BBCSounds www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Worth every fourteen minutes. Give it a listen before it goes

Trying to restrain myself from immediately descending into ugly bawling sentimentality. Some month! But it’s an honour. I couldn’t be happier at the idea that my stuff might appeal to writers and readers from my own homeplace. I’m grateful to judges, organisers, dream publisher Carcanet, all.

Colin Bramwell’s FOWER PESSOAS has won the 2025 Duas Leabhair na Gàidhealtacht / Highland Book Prize “Colin Bramwell puts all four of [Fernando] Pessoa’s heteronyms into a present-day Scots-language vernacular, & so creates a parochial Pessoa for our own times” www.highlandbookprize.org.uk/winner/

This from @jolloyds.bsky.social is great fun👇

29th of June 1776. Thomas Paine popularized the exact name "United States of America" in a newspaper letter.

Well I loved this. Spare, melancholy, elegiac, often nightmarish, with some exquisitely rendered monsters. Some further thoughts in alt. text.

Jo Lloyd on the radio. This is a great thing

This is from @elizmccrack.bsky.social’s A Long Game—

Manchesterism is when you buy a copy of Poor Ghost!

Exciting book news! @blackheraldpress.bsky.social make such beautiful books, I'm so delighted mine will be one of them. Please consider pre-ordering, it's a great help especially for small presses. 🙏

Our Island Music - a week long series 21.45 @BBCRadio3 in which musician & writer Colin MacIntyre, aka Mull Historical Society, explores 5 different British islands & what island life means to their musicians. Tonight, the Isle of #Mull. Producer Maggie Ayre www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Once Upon a Time… 5 modern fairy tales each eve 22.45 @BBCRadio4 We start with @davidjalmond.bsky.social reimagining The Little Mermaid on Holy Island. Magical new stories by @jolloyds.bsky.social @frankcottrellboyce.bsky.social Ben Okri & Katherine Rundell www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet, when larks rose on long thin strings of singing and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels… —Alastair Reid (1926–2014), “Scotland” published in WEATHERING: Poems & Translations (EP Dutton, 1978) #BookWormSat #poem #poetry

North Americans, you can now pre-order my Novel-prize shortlisted book Porcupine. The rest of the world, being less favoured, must wait a little longer I am afraid. Console yourselves with football, laudanum, whatever (or whoever) is at hand asterismbooks.com/product/porc...

New book! The fifth in the series @dancoxon.bsky.social and I edit for Dead Ink. Guidance and reflections on creative non-fiction from the likes of @jennashworth.bsky.social, @adamjfarrer.bsky.social, @tracyking.bsky.social, @noreenmasud.bsky.social and more! deadinkbooks.com/products/wri...

‘Sarah Hall is less interested than Richard Powers in the practicalities of environmental resistance, but she goes further in exploring what the voice of a natural phenomenon might sound like, and what it is that we can learn from it.’ Philippa Conlon reads 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘮. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Puschkinia scilloides Blooming through the snow in the middle of summer. West Azerbaijan, Iran Yesterday Elevation 2350

My essay on wartime Ukraine, visiting Zaporizhia, Myrove, Vilniansk and Sumy. @arlenhouse.bsky.social @dubreviewofbooks.bsky.social

A short story of mine, “The Enormous Man”, came out with Quarter(ly) Journal last year. Now that their new issue is out, I feel it’s okay to share it (link to pdf in first comment).

"‘What did you do?’ ‘Read. Played games. Searched for night parrots.’ ..." The Night Parrots — Stephen Orr minorliteratures.com/2026/06/25/t...

Magnetic North HQ

…and just for the adults #MiningLandscapes are teaming up with artist Winston Plowes at Westfield the former opencast coaling site #Kinglassie #Fife for ‘Dances With Time’ a free #landart taster session Mon 20th July. More info and to book nip to 👉 www.mining-landscapes.org/news/dances-...

We’ve had very much a ‘look at what you could have won’ of a storm - thunder rumbling a distance away, while rain was merely a piece of a paper, pushed through every letterbox, with ‘imagine it’s raining’ written on it.

Searing Sundown 3 (the Way Home) South Downs National Park, Hampshire UK #Photography #ClassicMono #Scape #EatCoastKin #ShotOnFairphone

Italo Calvino, writing home after crossing the Atlantic on a luxury ocean liner filled with aging rich people: “Long live Socialism. Long live Aviation.”

Moon on sea

Returning overly refreshed from a college dinner, Ruskin contrives to find the most ingenious-gentlemanly way of wondering ‘am I pissed’.

What Charlotte Higgins missed in her survey of Roman Britain sites gwallter.com/archaeology/...

I have a story in Radio 4's new Once Upon a Time series - a week of reimagined fairytales in the Book at Bedtime slot Lineup includes Katherine Rundell, Ben Okri, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, and David Almond (I KNOW!!!) My story "Kakapos" is on 30 June and then on catchup www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Don Paterson in Poetry London.

Moon on sea with sea kale