RIP Tony Harrison, 1937–2025. Except of course that I don’t want him to be resting in peace, I want him to be carrying on doing his awkward, troublesome, angry and sometimes tender but always honest thing. That he did this in so many forms – poetry, theatre, film – means there isn’t a convenient pigeonhole in which to bury him. He was both European and very local, from Leeds: the photo is of my first buy, 55 years ago.
This newsletter has nothing immediate to sell (except the whole backlist in print, 80-odd books, and please do click a button or two on the website) but Farah Ali’s Telegraphy, to be published in January, is now printing and will be up on the website for pre-orders very soon. Farah will be in conversation with Dur e Aziz Amna at Brick Lane Bookshop next Wednesday, 15 October: details here.
Substack, for me, is largely sub, off my radar, but an exception is the one written by Katy Evans-Bush, whose Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle was published last year and was a Guardian poetry-book-of-the-year pick. Don’t listen to the party conference speeches, don’t read reports of them, read Katy’s most recent post. American-born, she’s in Kent, frontier-land: ‘Dover […] is here, of course. Dover the town, the beach, is where the small dinghies land once they’ve made it from France. And of course Dover the cliff is an unofficial national symbol, bluebirds or no.’ Katy, like many of the non-UK-born people I know, has a far better understanding of UK history than most English people (I think the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish get it better), including me.
The harvest festival will take place at the Conway Hall in London on Friday and Saturday, 23 and 24 October. I mean the Small Publishers Fair, the annual event at which small publishers come out of their solitary caves and surprise themselves by being sociable. And books are sold, not just apples and pears but fruits even your local independent greengrocer doesn’t stock. Please come – full details here.
And then a couple of rare trips out of London: CBe will be the Bath Indie Book Fair on Saturday, 8 November; and at the Dublin Small Press Fair on 28/29 November.
