How High Did She Fly - new pamphlet!

My brand new pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, joint winner of the 2019 Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Competition, is now available! It contains 24 poems: half are inspired by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a play which had a powerful effect on me at 16; 30 years later, I decided to take another look and respond to some of its themes: women, voices, silence, love, sex and flight. Woven in between these are poems written at different times which are, I hope, create a conversation through and across the book. You can read two of the poems below, if you buy a copy from me before Jan 1st I will donate £1 from each sale to Samaritans

How High Did She Fly

UK £8.00 GBP Rest of World £9.50 GBP

I'm also offering a discounted bundle of How High Did She Fly + Terms and Conditions - with £1 donated to Samaritans from every purchase before Jan 1st.

How High Did She Fly + Terms and Conditions Discount Bundle

UK £15.00 GBP Rest of World £17.50 GBP

Who will call me beloved - Radio 4

The day has arrived! The arts documentary that Faith Lawrence and I have made about me being writer-in-residence in a cemetery and contemplating the language of memorials and how I - as a single woman with no children - might want to be remembered, will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 4pm, and will be available online after that: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b4r1

If you're outside the UK the programme is going out on the World Service on Friday Nov 15th, in their Heart and Soul slot! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct03by

I'd love to hear what you think - I've never done anything like this before! The Radio Times has it as a featured selection, in which they call me "something that baffles much of society: the deliberately single woman ", and a review on New Statesman said I sound "unpompous" and "untortured", all of which makes me laugh!

Live Canon Poetry Pamphlet Comp win!

Some very delightful news indeed - I am one of four winners of Live Canon's inaugural poetry pamphlet competition! My pamphlet is called How High Did She Fly, the title is a quote from Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a play that I saw when I was a teenager which had a huge impact on me. Half the poems in the pamphlet are inspired by the women in The Crucible and riff on the themes of women, women's voices, magic... and flying! Congrats to my fellow winners, Katie Griffiths, Miranda Peake and Robin Houghton, our pamphlets will be published some time in November, and there will be a launch party, so stay tuned!

New poem, The Aunts

I was lucky enough, as writer in residence at Manchester Southern Cemetery, to have a poem commissioned by the Manchester Poetry Library for the Radość Pisania: Manchester Polish Poetry Festival 2018. They asked me to respond to the work of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, the “Polish Sappho” (born in Kraków 1891, died in Manchester 1945), who is buried in the cemetery, and it was such a joy to discover her work, and then take inspiration from it. I read the poem at her grave during the festival, it felt immensely special. Here's a teaser:

The Aunts

Goodness and badness, stray from them
equally, say the aunts, robust
as hens and tough as millet seeds. Some
look through the window, others

are solving puzzles in a corner, one
is painting my ceiling. Good
and bad? I say. The aunts shake
and nod their heads. Outside...


You can read the full poem here.

Bumper week of publications

I'm not sure in my 15 or so years of writing that I've ever had a week like this - three pieces (in different genres) published in seven days: an audio poem, a science-inspired flash story and my second ever published piece of creative non-fiction! Here are the links if you'd like to listen to/read them.

Spendid, First Draft Manchester



How You Are, science-inspired flash fiction in Synaesthesia magazine

Rewatching Grey's Anatomy, creative non-fiction in The Real Story


I also have three poems in the new issue of print mag Golden Handcuffs Review - details here if you'd like to purchase a copy.