A thrilling love for the stuff of language … Magical’ Jon McGregor

The new collection by the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023, Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good hums with it’s author’s trademark fossicking language and ingenious experiments in form. These moving and exciting stories consider notions of playfulness, authenticity and care, even while they hold human relationships in all their sweet misunderstandings, soured reflections, queer wish fulfilments and shared, held breaths, up to the light.

Eley Williams’ writing appears in anthologies including The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Pilot Press’ Modern Queer Poets, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner. Her debut collection Attrib. and Other Stories won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and her novel The Liar’s Dictionary received a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors. Alex Pheby is Head of Creative Writing in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.

Alex Pheby is Head of Creative Writing in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University and Co-Director of NCLA.

This event took place in the Culture Lab on the 5th of December 2024.