Maria J. Pérez Cuervo is a freelance writer based in Bristol, UK, and the editor of Hellebore, a magazine devoted to folk horror and the occult. Her work has appeared in Fortean Times, Mental Floss, Daily Grail, The Order of the Good Death, The Ghastling, the book Spirits of Place, and many other places. You can find …
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Grave Goods – Maria J. Pérez Cuervo
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Grave Goods – Melissa Harrison
Melissa Harrison is a novelist, nature writer and columnist. Her most recent book, All Among the Barley, was the UK winner of the European Union Prize for Literature; At Hawthorn Time was nominated for the Costa Novel of the Year and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She lives in Suffolk, mostly, and London a bit. Tools …
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Book Review – Earth Memories, Llewlyn Powys
Review by Henry Rothwell. Lulworth image by Anna Dillon. ‘We have forgotten how to respond to the poetry of life. The hollow, tinkling facade of life put up by noisy and trivial people stands between us and our deepest wealth.’ Llewelyn Powys, 1913. Llewelyn Powys was a singular human, driven by atypical appetites which, though …
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Grave Goods – Maxim Peter Griffin.
Maxim Peter Griffin joins us for this Grave Goods outing. Maxim is an artist, writer and illustrator currently specialising in the landscape of Lincolnshire for his mammoth Field Notes project which ‘is about landscape. It is about topography and time. Chalk and flint and sea marsh. The coming and going of the sea, Neolithic farmers …
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Grave Goods – Edward Parnell.
In this outing, writer Edward Parnell selects which Grave Goods he’d take on the Awfully Big Adventure. Edward’s most recent book, ‘Ghostland’ is a fascinating expedition around Britain, following in the footsteps of hugely influential writers and their fictional characters, blended with threads of personal and natural history (see bottom of page for longer bio). …
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Grave Goods – Zoe Gilbert.
For this Grave Goods adventure, we invite author Zoe Gilbert to select the five objects she’d like to accompany her on the Awfully Big Adventure. Zoe’s first novel, Folk (2018, Bloomsbury), was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2019 and adapted for BBC Radio. She is the co-editor of A Wild and Precious Life (forthcoming, Unbound), …
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Book Review – Copsford, Walter Murray
Reviewed by Henry Rothwell. When the young Walter Murray first encountered Copsford in the first half of the 1920s, it was a dilapidated if not derelict cottage; the windows lacked much of their glass and let in the wind and rain, the front door wouldn’t shut and let in pretty much everything else, and the …
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Grave Goods – Jeff Noon.
For this Grave Goods selection, we’re delighted to welcome Jeff Noon. Jeff was born in Manchester in 1957, trained in the visual arts and drama, and was active on the post-punk music scene before becoming a playwright, and then a novelist. His books include Vurt (Arthur C. Clarke Award), Pollen, Automated Alice, Nymphomation, Needle in …
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Book Review – Ghostland, Edward Parnell.
Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell. Review by Barbara Chamberlin (see bottom of page for bio). The British landscape, be it geographical, literary, artistic or ideological, has always been riven with ghosts, a folkloric and supernatural fusion of the multiple histories and cultures embedded within the spaces that surround us. Ghost …
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Shams, Shellbacks and Sons of Rest – a Tramp Terminology.
This incomplete glossary has been compiled from the works of Jim Phelan ( 1895–1966). For those who have yet to encounter him, Phelan was a tramp author who produced a number of autobiographies, novels and film scripts during the 20th century. In his autobiographical material, he explains the meaning of a number of tramp words and …
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An Incomplete Romani Glossary.
The following glossary was taken from ‘A Time from the World’, by Rowena Farre. Though of non-Romani origin herself, she frequently joined various groups of the travelling community, including the Romani, Tinkers (itinerant tinsmiths), Mumpers (tramps who overwintered in the countryside), and often travelled solo too. ‘A Time from the World’ was republished in 2013 by …
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Grave Goods – David Gange.
Welcome to Grave Goods, a series of interviews in which the interviewee selects five items they’d like to accompany them to the afterlife. On this outing, we’re very happy to receive David Gange. David is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Birmingham. His current work aims to be to history as experimental archaeology is …
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Grave Goods – Hookland.
Welcome to Grave Goods, a series of interviews in which the interviewee selects five items they’d like to accompany them to the afterlife. This inaugural interview is, uniquely I think, with a fictional county. Hookland, the invention (or possibly discovery) of author David Southwell, is absent from conventional maps, though has an entire volume of …
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‘Wild Life in a Southern County’ by Richard Mabey.
‘Richard Mabey is among the best writers at work in Britain. I don’t mean among the best nature writers, I mean the best writers, full stop.‘ So says Tim Dee, in his review of Richard Mabey’s latest collection, ‘Turning the Boat for Home‘. I’m happy to agree, and even happier to share one of the essays …
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Long Live Great Bardfield, by Tirzah Garwood
Edited and with a preface by Anne Ullmann. 512pp ISBN 9781910263099 Published by Persephone Books. When Tirzah Garwood was 18 she went to Eastbourne School of Art and here she was taught by Eric Ravilious. Over the next four years she did many wood engravings and these were widely praised and several were displayed by …
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Wild Life in a Southern County, by Richard Jefferies
‘‘Jefferies’ attention to what he saw is rapt, exact, almost painterly’’ Richard Mabey When Richard Jefferies moved away from his family’s smallholding in north Wiltshire and settled in London to pursue a career as a writer, he began this breath-taking series of sketches which imagined every contour of the landscape he left behind: hedgerow, rookery, warren …
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Turning the Boat for Home, by Richard Mabey.
Britain’s most-influential nature writer reflects on a lifetime of close observation and celebrates the positive force of the natural world. From the rediscovery of foraging that led to Food for Free, through his groundbreaking expeditions in the ‘edgelands’ in the 1970s, to his reflections on the musicality of bird-song, he has consistently explored new ways …
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Greenery, by Tim Dee.
A masterpiece of nature writing from the author of The Running Sky. One December, in midsummer South Africa, Tim Dee was watching swallows. They were at home there, but the same birds would soon begin journeying north to Europe, where their arrival marks the beginning of spring. Between the winter and the summer solstice in Europe, …
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