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RLF Fellows’ News: June 2025

Publishing

Bernie McGill’s first short story collection Sleepwalkers has been reissued by No Alibis Press.

Bernie was the winner of the 2023 Edge Hill Prize with her short story ‘This Train is For’.

The reissued publication also includes an additional story shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, as well as Bernie’s BBC Radio 4 Short Works commission, Waiting for Joseph.

Sanjida O’Connell’s short story ‘Meat’ has been published in the anthology The Monster, Capital: Tales of Unease, edited by Ra Page, part of Comma Press’s acclaimed horror series.

‘Meat’ follows artist Lily as she prepares to stage her first solo show in her husband’s gallery. Determined for success, she creates living Memento mori sculptures featuring her husband’s lab-grown meat. But as the exhibition opening approaches, Lily discovers the dark secrets her husband has been keeping from her.

Maisie Chan’s new novel for children, Nate Yu’s Blast From The Past is out on 12 June.

Maisie explains: “For a long time, I’d really wanted to write about the Chinese Labour Corp in the First World War but wasn’t sure how to do it. I believe this is the first UK children’s novel to talk about the subject. It’s about forgotten histories, a family secret, and Nate who thinks he’s not Chinese enough. If you’re a fan of my novel Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths or the BBC series Ghosts, then you might like it!”

You can pre-order signed copies here.

Rahila Gupta and Beatrix Campbell‘s Planet Patriarchy: Global Tales of Feminism and Oppression, is available to pre-order now.

Described as “a continent-crossing panorama of women’s rights, women’s oppression and women’s politics in the 21st century”, Planet Patriarchy looks at why the world is lurching dangerously away from the ideals avowed in 1995, when the UN pledged to advance “equality, development and peace for all women, everywhere”.

The book asks: why does oppression, rather than feminism, still dominate our world?

Wren James’ new book The Climate-Conscious Writers Handbook is published this month.

The journal is a not-for-profit project created by Wren James and the Climate Fiction Writers League, in collaboration with leading climate storytelling experts, including Climate Spring, Stanford University, Green Stories and Rewriting Earth.

Wren says: “Are you a writer who’s worried about the environment? Would you like to learn how to weave climate themes into genres like romance, thrillers or literary fiction? This playful, interactive handbook is designed to support you through every stage in the writing process – from first idea to drafting and querying. This is for writers of any kind of book who want to talk about climate change.”

Broadcasts

Marcy Kahan’s new Radio 4 drama Underfoot in Show Business, which is available to listen to now on BBC Sounds, is an adaptation of playwright Helene Hanff’s 1961 memoir.

Best known for her book 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff’s stories about her time as a struggling writer on the fringes of show business feature plenty of witty anecdotes about getting by on no money, plus a parade of fascinating characters, and the correspondence with a London bookshop that ultimately saved her.

Lucy Caldwell’s Radio 4 drama At Sea is one of a trilogy of plays looking at different ways families say goodbye.

Set in a refugee camp in Berwick Upon Tweed filled with families fleeing from Cholera-torn London, At Sea sees three generations of a family struggle to hold themselves together in extreme circumstances. The Father has already escaped to Norway under the cover of night to try to set up a new home, but the struggle gets ever greater as a traumatised son, a devastated mother and a determined daughter and grandmother go on a journey that leaves them no choice but to say goodbye.

Directed by Celia de Wolf for BBC NI Radio Drama. At Sea will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 11 June and available to listen to on BBC Sounds.

Stephen Wyatt presents Unsung Heroes, a series of talks for Radio 3’s The Essay about the importance of librettists to opera and musicals.

Recorded at home in Stephen’s library, the talks were produced by Torquil Macloud and cover topics such as what it’s like to work with a composer and how a librettist might approach an adaptation.

The talks will be broadcast on Radio 3 at 9:45 pm on consecutive nights during the week of 16 June. Listen on BBC Radio 3, or via BBC Sounds.

Productions

Lisa Parry’s play Salem, currently showing at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, runs at The Young Vic in London from 11 – 14 June:

“Capel Salem, Gwynedd. In 2025, two Welsh nationalists hide out with ‘Salem’ – a painting they’ve stolen from a Liverpool art gallery to decolonise Welsh art. In 1908, Sydney Curnow Vosper paints, his vision disputed by its sitters. Is it possible to ever prescribe a work of art’s meaning?”

For tickets to the Young Vic production, see the website.

Stephen Sharkey is organising A Wake for the Grand Old Lady on 27 and 28 June at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre, to mark the end of Everton’s era at Goodison Park.

Writers including RLF Fellow Lizzie Nunnery, Robert Farquhar, Jeff Young and Llinos Gerallt will share songs, short plays, poems and stories with one thing in common – Goodison Park, which is described by the organisers as being:

“More than a football ground. It’s a cathedral, a social club and your gran’s front room rolled into one. The seats and stands are soaked in generations of devotion. The pies are baked in white-hot Evertonian fervour. Stories will be told about all of the great nights. The goals, the glories and people getting misty-eyed about their first games”.

The Silence of Snow: The Life of Patrick Hamilton opens at Sadler’s Wells on 20 June.

A solo show written and performed by Mark Farrelly, The Silence of Snow is based on the life of Patrick Hamilton (1904 – 1962), a writer who left part of his estate to the Royal Literary Fund.

Hamilton was one of the great English writers of the interwar years. His play Gaslight gave us the term ‘gaslighting’, which means manipulating a person’s sense of reality.

Awards

Earlier this year, Miranda Moore won the inaugural David Fickling Books and Arvon Foundation Search for a Storyteller competition for an unpublished fiction author. Her winning novel, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing, is now available to preorder, before publication by David Fickling Books this October.

A Beautiful, Terrible Thing is described as: “A compulsively readable story exploring grief and loss, love and atonement. Cara’s world is shattered when her younger brother Si dies in a car crash. Three months later, she is trying to piece herself back together when she meets Nathan – gorgeous, smart, kind. But Nathan is harbouring a devastating secret that threatens everything”.

Clare Pollard has won the inaugural Tadeusz Bradecki Prize for her book, The Modern Fairies.

Created to honour the late Tadeusz Bradecki – international theatre director, actor and writer – the Prize is awarded annually for a book in which fiction and non-fiction writing combine in an original and exciting way.

More information here.

Events and appearances

Sanjida O’Connell will be at Cymera Festival on 6 June, talking about her short story ‘Meat’, along with fellow The Monster, Capital contributor Bronte Schiltz and editor Ra Page.

Tickets are available here.

Maisie Chan will take part in the London Primary Schools Programme with Barnes Children’s Literature Festival on 12 June, where she will speak to children about her multi-award-winning novel Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, share her top tips for writing and drawing your own stories, and introduce her new novel Nate Yu’s Blast From the Past.

Tickets are available here.

Vayu Naidu will be taking part in The Jaipur Literature Festival London 2025 (14 – 15 June) at the British Library.

The Jaipur Literature Festival is one of the world’s greatest literature festivals, attracting huge and largely youthful audiences to the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur in Rajasthan, India, every winter. Festival Co-Directors, William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, and Producer Sanjoy K. Roy of Teamwork Arts, present a series of international editions of this remarkable festival in the UK, Europe and America, including JLF London at the British Library, now in its 12th year.

For more information about the festival and to buy tickets, visit the JLF at the British Library event page.

Miranda Miller will be in conversation with fellow author and publisher Martin Goodman at Barbican Fest on 26 June.

She will be discussing her latest novel When I Was and what it is like working in the genre of autofiction, basing characters on real people and exploring her memories.

For more information about Barbican Fest, take a look at the website. You can buy tickets for Miranda’s event here.

Bradford Literary Festival

On 27 June Clare Shaw presents ‘Literature That Haunts’, a Lunch Bites event for Bradford Literature Festival that explores the psychological power of haunted literature through classics like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.

Tickets are available here.

On 28 June Caroline Sanderson will be taking part in the panel discussion ‘Jane Austen: The Woman Behind the Words,’ alongside Helen Kelly and Lizzie Dunford.

Marking 250 years since Austen’s birth, the session will explore how her quiet defiance and enduring relevance continue to inspire.

Tickets available here.

Jo Bell will be this year’s chair for the popular Lyrical Mehfil at Bradford Literary Festival.

Mehfils are traditional gatherings of courtly entertainment performed for small audiences in the homes and palaces of South Asian nobility, and the assembly of talent at this event is fit for a king. This year, a dazzling line-up of poets reflecting some of the most innovative international voices will descend on Bradford, bringing a range of poetic styles and voices to this intimate event.

The Lyrical Mehfil takes place on 28 June. Tickets here.

On 29 June, Jo Bell will also be discussing her memoir Boater: A Life on England’s Waterways, which explores the joys and challenges of a life afloat. Jo has spent over twenty years travelling the UK’s canals, meeting extraordinary people and navigating a world shaped by history, community, and quiet adventure.

Tickets are available here.

Also on 29 June, Jo Bell will interview John Siddique, as he reflects on the 20th anniversary of his Forward Prize-nominated collection The Prize:

“Often accused of thinking too much, feeling too deeply, and saying the wrong thing at exactly the right time, John Siddique’s The Prize marked a bold ‘hell yes’ to it all. In this wide-ranging and intimate conversation, Siddique sits down with poet Jo Bell to explore the lasting resonance of The Prize and the personal and cultural ripples that continue to radiate from this brave, perception-shifting collection of poems.”

Tickets available here.

On 6 July, John Siddique will chair another event – WritersMosaic Presents: Global Crime Queens.

Bestselling global crime fiction authors Kia Abdullah – a former JB Priestley Award recipient – Nadine Matheson and Saima Mir will join John to discuss the creative drive, personal journeys, and cultural forces that shape their narratives.

Tickets available here.

RLF Fellows can submit their news to us via the Contact Us page.

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