I’m a published fiction writer. My stories have appeared in The London Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, Scoundrel Time, Lunate, Litro, The Cardiff Review, Bandit, Storgy and Scratch Books. I was shortlisted for the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize, the 2023 and 2021 Brick Lane Short Story Prizes, the 2023 London Independent Story Prize, and the 2021 Fish Short Story Prize.
I’ve always been preoccupied with great stories. My earliest memories, aged four or five, are of sitting astride a wooden toy train listening to my father tell stories that placed me at the very centre of a narrative. He would weave tales where I was a train driver or an astronaut and, since then, and throughout my life, I’ve been hooked on great and engaging stories, well told.
My short stories and novels explore broken relationships, fucked up families, damaged men and messy women, and all the chaos that they leave in their wake. I’m drawn to darkness and melancholia but I’m hopeful too, about our individual and collective potential for redemption. Let’s call it optimistic melancholy.
My favourite novels are those that channel the experiences of a young child as witness to tragedy. I’m thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, Michael Frayn’s Spies. Books about children, but definitely not for children. Recent literary highlights have been My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, Send Nudes by Saba Sams, Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, Damon Galgut’s The Promise, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottesa Moshfegh. I’m also a fan of writing about the landscape - Robert Macfarlane, Nan Shepherd, and Roger Deakin. I find inspiration in the John Muir quote: “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
Every couple of years I read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway to remind me how effortless great writing can seem.
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The Winter Son: A Novel
The Winter Son is a literary fiction set in Cornwall in 1980.
A 10-year-old boy is scattering his mother’s ashes on a Cornish beach when his father slips into the sea and disappears. The boy has been raised in a remote Cornish valley and home-schooled about the horrors of the modern world – a changing climate, a cold war, acid rain, disease. Numbed by grief, the boy determines to make his way by foot back to his home, and to attempt to live alone, beyond the threat of a changing world he’s been taught to fear.
The Winter Son is currently seeking a publisher.
