Candlestick Press Ten Poems From Northumbria 2025
I’m very proud to have my poem STONE DANCING ON HOLY ISLAND included in this extraordinary collection. Northumberland is border country – a place of ballads and battles and windswept beaches where grand castles stand sentinel. This mini anthology celebrates the wild beauty of the county’s landscapes, where the past still seems to linger in the ruggedness of rock and moorland.
Water laps at the edges of many of the poems. There’s an evocation of crossing the causeway to Holy Island as the tide swirls inward and a paean to Berwick upon Tweed with its “platinum threadings of submersion”. There’s also a poignant elegy to the famous sycamore that was illegally felled in 2023:
Sunburnt Saints Published 30th November 2021
Soooo excited to be part of this new book adventure with Seventy2One – a dynamic new approach to publishing and working with authors to showcase new work in print. So proud to be writing our times alongside powerful new and established writers. My story The Book of Signs was a story that wanted to be told, it took me off guard. I was haunted by my teenage self, a young woman who read the world as a book of signs and decided that it was telling her not to have a child. Later as a mother of one from a big family, this story fictionalises the debate I had and women I know have about their relationship with the planet that sustains them and their own ability to create.
PUBLISHED ON NOVEMBER30th 2021 An indispensable anthology of climate fiction, featuring Billy O’Callaghan (My Coney Island Baby), Antonia Honeywell (The Ship), Carmen Marcus (How Saints Die), Elisabeth Ingram Wallace (winner of the Mogford Short Story Prize) and many more.’Some stories can change you forever. What you do with that change is up to you.’
Test Signal Bloomsbury & Dead Ink
Published March 2021
Description
A ground-breaking anthology of the best contemporary northern writing from Dead Ink and Bloomsbury, showcasing the wealth of literary talent in the North of England.
‘Test Signal … is testament to the fact that there is no singular prescription of what it means to be a northern writer and no such thing as a definitive northern voice; instead it celebrates a community of writers, each telling a different story in their own words’ JESSICA ANDREWS
bridges over the Tyne / crumbling coastlines / influencers’ online worlds / asylum applications / packed train carriages / forgotten village social clubs / family in Nigeria / holidays in Greece / shining university campuses / ghosts in city cemeteries / jobs in London / teenage explorations / monstrous graffiti / suburban woodland
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/test-signal-9781526630919/
I am very proud to have my short story ‘THE UPSDIE DOWN MAN’ published with Storgy in this incredible collection of brilliant writers to keep us strong and offer hope.
How Saints Die, Harvill Secker, 2017, Vintage, 2018
How Saints Die is my semi-autobiographical debut novel about ten-year-old Ellie Fleck, the daughter of a fisherman, growing up in a ramshackle 1980s fishing village, and her search for her lost mother.
It is a magical real tale about mental illness seen through the eyes of a child and the ways in which we create imagined worlds from the myths we grow up with to create a space for healing.
How Saints Die was long listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018 and won a New Writing North Northern Promise Award as a work in progress.
‘What a glorious, beautiful sea-shanty of a book this is. A fairy tale of wild, sea-swept children and wolfish fear. Written in a compelling, rushing language.’ Daisy Johnson, author of the Man Booker-longlisted Everything Under
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1112639/how-saints-die/9781784705510.html
Short Stories
Bight, Tomcat and the Moon, It Came From Beneath the Waves, Mantle Lane Press,
https://www.mantlelanepress.co.uk/It_Came_from_Beneath_the_Waves/p1998877_18580326.aspx
Poetry
The Breakout Anthology, Ek Zuban, 2013
Carmen Marcus 