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Buttermilk and Liverwurst (2024) Granta
I wrote a short story inspired by Vera Ellen’s necklines in the movie White Christmas (1954). I grew up watching old musicals and it was a lot of fun to write! Granta have published it in their online edition, so its free to read here.
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Poems as Portals
Thanks so much to Rosie Roberts for commissioning me to write a response to Nat Raha’s extraordinary performance epistolary (on carceral islands) as part of her Edinburgh Art Festival 2023 series for MAP magazine. You can read the piece here.
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Abolition Science Fiction – book, e-book, and audio-book available now!
I am delighted to say that the book resulting from my research project Prison Break (2021-2022) is now available as a book, e-book, and audio-book from the project website abolitionscifi.org. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the book, it was a dream to work with you all. Abolition Science Fiction (2022) is a free collection…
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The Moon Spins the Dead Prison
Really proud to have edited this collection of essays with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts for the School of Abolition. The Moon Spins the Dead Prison brings together a collection of new essays that explore the meaning, practices, and politics of prison abolition from local, national and global positions and perspectives. The publication includes new…
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The Town Marshal on BBC Radio4
My short story The Town Marshal was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of The Poet and the Echo: a short story series in which writers choose poems as inspiration for new stories. You can listen back to it HERE. The story was inspired by a poem from Edgar Lee Masters’s intoxicating Spoon River…
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ISRF Fellowship 2021-2022: Prison Break
‘the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology.’ H.G Wells in Utopia as Method (2013) Ruth Levitas. ‘[A]ll [activist] organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality…
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Erratics – commission for Hanne Lillee’s ‘Foreign Fauna’
Image credit: Hanne Lillee. Header image: Hanne Lillee (2019) Ovules I was delighted to contribute a piece of writing on pregnancy, food, decay and the Fortingall Yew, for Hanne Lillee’s beautiful new book Foreign Fauna. Hanne writes: “The photographs explore growth and propagation, as well as decomposition and rot, and the repetitive force that transforms…
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Just Humans podcast – Translation
I was honoured to be the guest on episode 2 of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research’s new podcast Just Humans. We talked about my sociological research using fiction and poetry and Stir my new poetry pamphlet for the Distant Voices project. When we think about translation we usually think of translating from…
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Becoming different together by Les Back — Streetsigns
Vox Liminis is a project in Glasgow that challenges criminal justice and fosters communities through song writing and music How do you imagine a new kind of life if you have served time in prison? How can music help people trying to walk that line out of prison to a free life? In this podcast we visit an extraordinary project called Vox Liminis based in the Gallowgate, in […]…
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Stir, field works from the Distant Voices project
Stir (2020) is a collection of poems which were written while I was the research associate on the Distant Voices project (2017-2021).[1] I’m a visual sociologist (sociologist with an art practice as part of their approach) and these poems reflect on my experience of doing ethnographic research in carceral spaces, written from the perspective of an…