Monday 25th November

LAUNCH: PLEASURE GARDENS BY SKYE ARUNDHATI THOMAS & IZABELLA SCOTT

Please join us for the launch of Skye Arundhati Thomas & Izabella Scott’s co-written book, Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir (MACK, 2024). Thomas and Scott will be joined by Shola von Reinhold.

Pleasure Gardens is an urgent two-part project that investigates the military occupation, land appropriation, and communication blackouts in Kashmir, a region whose heavily militarized borders have frequently been a site of conflict between India and Pakistan. Taking a 213-day blackout in 2019 as its starting point, the project aims to detail the reasoning behind these blockades, seeking a new register of writing and image that makes visible the conditions of occupation and the protracted violence of the blackout. The book includes photo essays by Ufaq Fatima, Nawal Ali, and Zainab.

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor from India. Pleasure Gardens (co-written with Izabella Scott) on constitutional law, military occupation and communications blackouts is out now with MACK. Their next book, on the painter Lalitha Lajmi, is forthcoming from Sternberg Press. 

Izabella Scott is a writer and editor based in London. Pleasure Gardens (co-written with Skye Arundhati Thomas) on constitutional law, military occupation and communications blackouts is out now with MACK. She is currently writing a book of nonfiction, titled The Bed Trick, which is forthcoming from Atlantic. 

Shola von Reinhold is a writer based in Glasgow and author of the novel LOTE (2020).

Tuesday 26th November

LAUNCH: ROCK FLIGHT BY HASIB HOURANI

Please join us for the launch of Hasib Hourani's debut collection, rock flight (Prototype Publishing, 2024). Hasib will be joined by Colin Herd and Hussein Mitha. 

rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator who lives in so-called Australia. His 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted in the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize and appears in the anthology, Against Disappearance. rock flightis his first book.

Colin Herd is a poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Glasgow. His books include Too Ok (2011), Glovebox (2013), Oberwilding- with SJ Fowler (2015), Click and Collect (2017),You Name It (2019) and Cocoa & Nothing- with Maria Sledmere (2022). He has also edited four anthologies of contemporary poetry. Dennis Cooper has written of his work that it is "exquisite and adventurous and armed to the teeth". 

Hussein Mitha is an artist and writer who lives in Glasgow.

Hasib Hourani's UK events have been made possible through the International Travel Fund for Authors and Illustrators (Creative Australia). 

Thursday 28th November

LAUNCH: BIG SONG BY STEPHEN EMMERSON

Please join us for the launch of Big Song by Stephen Emmerson (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). Emmerson will be joined by Jane Goldman, Nicky Melville, and Vik Shirley.

Stephen Emmerson's Big Song is a book concerned with overcoming trauma, with memory, with language, with body. It is a book about not forgetting, about finding yourself in a place that you thought you had left. It is a work of remembering, in which unfolds the act of the constant writing of self into text. It is a poetics of loss, and as such Big Song itself becomes an act of resuscitation. This is a book with teeth, and one which shows the way forward.

Stephen Emmerson is a writer and artist. His books include: A Piece, Family Portraits, and Poetry Wholes - all published by If P Then Q, Dungeness Guillemot Press, and A Box of Ideas, and Gallery - both published by Timglaset. His most recent book Big Song is out now from Broken Sleep Books. He also maintains the website 8OX https://eightox.org/.

Jane Goldman is Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, a founding General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, and a poet. She likes anything a word can do. She is a member of 12, a collective of women poets based in Scotland, and of the Writers' Shift at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. Her debut poetry collection SEKXPHRASTIKS was published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2021. Pink Witch (2024), a collection of poems she produced with 12, critiques the recent film Barbie via the Witches of Scotland campaign. Catullus 64, her translation of the Latin poet Catullus's longestpoem, was published by Main Point Books in 2023.

Nicky Melville is a poet, writer, educator – the lot! His most recent publications are Power Cuts (zimZalla, 2024) and sounding … out (essence press, 2024). Melville’s Selected poems Decade of Cuts was published by Blue Diode in 2021, and his magnum opus The Imperative Commands in 2022 with Dostoyevsky Wannabe. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, where he lives with his partner and whippet, Beckett.

Vik Shirley is a poet and writer from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her books include Strangers Wave (zimZalla, 2023), Corpses (Sublunary Editions, 2020) and The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN, 2021). Her work has also appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, and Dreaming Awake: New and Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom (MadHat, 2023). Shirley co-edits Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius, and Firmament online for Sublunary Editions, and she holds a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.

Wednesday 4th December

LAUNCH: PROPERTY JOURNAL BY AMY CHING-YAN LAM

To launch the book, Amy will be joined in conversation by Daisy Lafarge.

‘Around this time last year, I had a birthday astrology reading where the reader said they could tell, just by looking at my chart, that I had run away from home when I was seventeen. They said that this year would be a revisiting of that event, but it would happen in a completely different way.’

From December 2021 to December 2022, artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam kept a record of each time real estate, property or housing came up in conversation. She called this the Property Journal.

Over the course of a year, neighbourhood landmarks are demolished, politicians break promises, friends despair, and parents age. Mould appears to grow on Lam’s face moisturiser; as property organises people’s lives, it also overtakes them. What began as a simple framework soon becomes an index of precarity, told through the indignities, dread, and dreamscapes of what we’re able to call ‘home’.

Tender, fierce, and mordantly funny, Property Journal is a damning indictment of the permanent state of affairs known as the housing crisis. 

Amy Ching-Yan Lam is an artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Baby Book (2023, Brick Books), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards in Poetry, and Looty Goes to Heaven (2022, Eastside Projects). From 2006 to 2020 she was in the performance art duo Life of a Craphead. She lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, and was born in Hong Kong.