BackStory: Five Questions with Lixin Foo Author of The Consort of Closed Fists What inspired you to write ‘The Consort of Closed Fists’? I bought a book on famous women from Imperial Chinese harems in high school. As I was…
The Consort of Closed Fists
Read and listen in English. Read and listen in Chinese / 中文. The Consort of Closed Fists by Lixin Foo When the Emperor banished her in chains, her fingers moved on instinct. As a child, she’d made a habit…
BackStory: Five Questions with Marie Hoy-Kenny
BackStory: Five Questions with Marie Hoy-Kenny Author of In the Hours Before the 1959 Auchengeich Coal Mine Disaster What inspired you to write ‘In the Hours Before the 1959 Auchengeich Coal Mine Disaster’? My father’s brothers worked at the Auchengeich…
In the Hours Before the 1959 Auchengeich Coal Mine Disaster
In the Hours Before the 1959 Auchengeich Coal Mine Disaster by Marie Hoy-Kenny You wake, your wife Jean still serene in sleep, breathing deeply beside you. The sky is dark through the cracks between the curtains, but last night you…
BackStory: Three Questions with Isabelle B.L
BackStory: Three Questions with Isabelle B.L Author of Cords What inspired you to write ‘Cords’? I was born in the 1970s and when I was a child, my mother wanted me to wear a girdle. I was on the chubby…
Cords
Cords by Isabelle B.L I’m a whale, a bell and a multifunctional cord. Today, I receive something to make my waist smaller. The giver says: “It’s made with 98 whale bones, my dear.” Hands of a woman I can’t see…
BackStory: Four Questions with Claire Loader
BackStory: Four Questions with Claire Loader Author of Hunger What inspired you to write ‘Hunger’? I think like many people, I found myself during lockdown delving deeper into late night online rabbit holes than usual. One night I stumbled on…
Hunger
Hunger 1315 by Claire Loader The storms came in the spring, slipped the waking earth, hushed her back to sleep again. We scraped the bottom of our winter bowls, stagnated hours lingering, listless – lips parched with thinning prayers. I…
BackStory: Five Questions with Robert Barrett
BackStory: Five Questions with Robert Barrett Author of Footprints in Water What inspired you to write ‘Footprints in Water’? I went to a boarding school in the 1980s. It was a sort of Irish Hogwarts where television was non-existent, the internet…
Footprints in Water
Footprints in Water by Robert Barrett On Christmas Eve, she fell; sucked downwards through the angry, screaming wind, head first, through two miles of unencumbered sky, and no thought can take root, only the biting of the seatbelt across her…