Hello, and welcome to the future!
I’m a writer based in London, and author of the Absalon novels: 'Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.' (London Review of Books) I am the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at City, University of London, was a judge on this year’s Orwell Prize for political fiction, and am completing my PhD in English Literature at the University of Reading’s Samuel Beckett Research Centre, where I was a Creative Fellow.
I’ve spent the past couple of years thinking and writing about the future of the novel for a book of the same name (forthcoming in 2025 from Melville House). Mine will be the latest in a long line of books by working novelists exploring the novel’s future, going all the way back to the great Henry James himself, in 1899 (one of the best!).
I hope you will join me here to explore new forms in fiction. I’ll be sharing what I have discovered about a possible future for the novel through my own reading and writing. I will also be chatting with literary agents, publishers, booksellers, translators, critics – as well as with you, fellow readers and writers – about the novel’s myriad possible futures.
Free subscribers will get at least one free post a month.
Paid subscribers will get:
in-depth posts about innovative novel-writing processes, ground-breaking novels and other stuff;
access to my ongoing conversations with agents, publishers, novelists and others about the novel’s future; and
access to our own private chat channel, which is a place to:
meet, greet and compare notes with others who care about the novel’s future; and
ask me any questions (which I will try to answer in upcoming posts).
Founding subscribers will get all of the above, plus a signed and dedicated copy of The Future of the Novel when it is published next year, as well as my undying gratitude.
“The future undoubtedly lies with those who are to-day dissatisfied and experimental…[with those who are] more suspicious of literary traditions, more eager to try out new forms, more exacting in their standards of success.” The Future of the Novel by John Carruthers (1927)
