Heading into the holidays? Here’s a handy list of favourites I read in 2024 to guide your reading. The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes – This is climate fiction at its best and most poignant and, as Hughes notes, ‘Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction.’ My
Listen up … I loved these poems when I read them during the last half of 2024. I hope you also enjoy their different music. ‘Object Permanence’ by Madeleine Cravens The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole / time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn. / Everyone I love
Some of the best short stories I read in the second half of 2024 included circus mammas, love, grief and philosophy, and a prickly character called Pearl who curls into an armchair ‘like cream’. I hope you lap them up! ‘The Mothers and The Girls’ by Saba Sams In Send Nudes Saba Sams immerses us
Here are some poems from the first half of 2024 that shone a light on a diversity of subjects for me in their examination of grief, impermanence, environmental destruction and more. ‘Given to Rust’ by Vievee Francis Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved / through the gap in my teeth
These short stories interrogate the mysteriousness of human life and relationships and they’re some of the best stories I read in the first half of 2024. ‘Sky Bar’ by Katherine Heiny In ‘Sky Bar’ from Katherine Heiny’s collection Games and Rituals we meet Fawn and discover there is nothing left for her in her home
Moody, broody and wild … precisely how I love short stories to be. And these are some of the best I read in 2023. ‘Anyone Can Do It’ by Manuel Muñoz Muñoz creates a mood in his latest collection of stories which I love and ‘Anyone Can Do It’ is especially evocative. The stories in
My best strategy for combatting overwork over the last six months has been reading poetry first thing before I migrate to my desk. Here are some of the poems that most inspired me. ‘September 8, 2017’ by Kerry Greer Like Judas to himself / He took a piece of paper, / Lit it at the
There’s hard-earned wisdom in these books to help people who are struggling. Do you mind? Minding Your Mind is based on James O’Loghlin and Professor Ian Hickie’s popular podcast and it broaches burn-out and depression, humour and community, trauma and addiction, anger and self-control, managing your body clock and more. Like a warm chat on a cold
Seven diverse short stories that plumb the depths of human experience. I love them all. ‘Why My Hair is Long’ ‘If my mother had called me and asked, “What have I done that you can’t forget?” I would have said, “I can forgive anything.” But she never called and that is what I can never forget.’
These poems offered warm lights and pools of delight in the second half of 2022. ‘At Springbrook’ by Sarah Holland-Batt I carry in heartwood for the stove. / When I swing open its glass door / a greying bee falls from the grate. / Tufted with ash, it moves ponderously / as though each of
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