Literature

Whenever you read anything, you are made conscious of your class. This is especially true if you have a working-class background. I was struck by this recently while reading Alberto Manguel’s essay collection Into the Looking Glass Wood in…

Detective Kieran Temple is woken by a 4am phone call from his ex-partner, Mia Burrows. She’s just killed her boyfriend. Compelled to investigate the death, Temple finds he must do so behind the backs of his superiors and his wife. All…

HeadStuff's very own Tara Flynn's new book, Rage-In is out!  Launches to be held in Dublin and Cork.  This month also sees poetry award deadlines, ILFDublin Off The Page events announced, other book launches and a digital release of Kathy…

To Provide By Elizabeth O'Connell-Thompson Begin with an assembled sanctity. I make the most of each defect, affirm that the process of being called me to the stage. Be it a short life, I declare.                        The life of a person…

The Malvern Hills are known for their beautiful views, long hikes and bike trails but Ledbury the small town at the heart of these hills is the venue to one of the biggest poetry festivals in the UK. Every year thousands of people descend…

It’s been a month since I finished reading John Boyne’s latest novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and I haven’t quite gotten over it yet. A radical statement, about a novel?  Perhaps, but Boyne’s story and characters have remained with me…

Dear Richard, Remember that pact we made? Signed and sealed with spit-slicked hands. Time’s up. I’ve decided to keep it. It’s weird of me to write a letter, I know. Why not just text, or even an email? I’m writing you a letter the…

Smokey jazz music welcomes you to 1968 Manhattan so vividly that you reach for a phantom cigarette to follow a non-existent sip of a martini. To intensify your desire for a drink, there’s a fully stocked bar adjacent to the front door of a…

Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of 'Hill Speak'…

In late 2017, Cork-based New Binary Press issued an open call for submissions to a new anthology in aid of the fight – both at home and abroad – for women’s reproductive rights. Autonomy, to be edited by poet, workshop facilitator and…