Queer Amusements residency

From spring through to autumn of 2024, I was the first ever writer-in-residence for Queer Amusements, a brand new multi-artform festival taking place in Blackpool. I shared regular updates from my residency over at Blackpool Social Club, and developed new material for a full-length immersive performance that took place during the festival’s finale.

Read more about my residency here

Lost + Found

From knife-wielding, road-tripping teen queens causing cross-country mayhem to anonymous, enigmatic narrators waxing lyrical about their sex toys via stories set on school buses and in notorious council estate pubs, queer clubs, and TV newsrooms, Lost + Found is my latest chapbook collection, released in April 2024.

Featuring seven short stories and accompanying non-fiction reflections exclusively collected together for the first time, Lost+ Found explores themes of memory, loss, nostalgia, grief, liminality and identity, bringing together some of my earliest published stories alongside never-before-seen fiction and brand new material.

Order your copy here

Dear Neighbour

Five strangers. Four weeks. One letter that will change everything…

My debut novel tells the story of Alice, a single mum living in Leeds, her next-door neighbour Bill, a widower still grieving his wife’s death a decade earlier, and the other residents of their street. It’s a novel about surviving austerity, the power of community and found family, and the real definition of home.

For me, politics, identity, creativity and community have always been interconnected, and Dear Neighbour is a love letter to all those impacted by austerity and housing insecurity, and to the necessity of resilience, resistance and empathy. It’s available to buy now in hardback, paperback, e-book or audiobook formats everywhere that books are sold.

Find out more about the book

Truth or Dare

Featuring eight short stories and performance pieces exclusively collected together for the first time, Truth or Dare is a journey taking in illegal raves, toga parties, teen alienation, fear, activism and escape, featuring prophetic nightmares, pancakes, razorblade amnesties, freight trains, misadventures with punk drummers and losing your virginity to your best friend. By turns tender, intimate and furious, Truth or Dare explores the teenage experience through its authentic, multi-faceted characters and its distinctive use of voice, language, imagery and atmosphere. From playing spin the bottle and starting fires to surviving the end of the world, Truth or Dare is the first ever dedicated collection of my writing, and includes several original pieces never shared anywhere else until now.

Order your copy here

Performance Poetry Films

A found poetry love letter to queer clubs, women and toilet graffiti. A tribute to nineties slasher films and all the sexual confusion they created in an entire generation of horror-obsessed teens. A surreal, hallucinatory trip through the sleep-deprived world of working ‘anti-social hours’. Over the course of 2021/22, I was awarded a DYCP grant from Arts Council England to collaborate with director Sophie Broadgate and sound artist Synda Sova to make three short films based on my performance poetry: Lack of Daylight, Sexual Experimentation While Watching Scream and Latrinalia, which was also screened at Fringe! Queer Film Festival in London.

Watch them here

So Long As You Write

You’ve found your voice. Not that it’s a destination we can mark on any treasure map; like all things when it comes to creativity, it’s an ever-evolving process, a thing that’s always in flux, always alive and never done. But you’ve put your time in: you’ve clawed through the shit to get to the gold, and it’s been joyful and devastating and more tough than anyone ever said it’d be. And now. Now you’ve got something that needs to be shared. It’s an ember glowing inside you, and either you dig it out to use as a lantern-light, or it stays inside and burns you alive. You find your voice, and then you have to use it. And that’s a thing that, frankly, can be fucking terrifying.

Fuck (Your) Demons, Find Community, Become Incandescent is an essay I wrote for the Dear Damsels collection, So Long As You Write (2022). 

Read it here

We're Made of Electricity

It starts in the heatwave summer. There are power cuts and no rain and we play out as long as we can, until Imogen and Amber go missing. Before we know about them, we are satisfyingly feral, roaming the estate until dark. There have been storms, on and off, and the air tastes of tin. On the park, there’s a burnt tree everyone says was struck by lightning. When the fat raindrops start coming, we stand underneath its blackened branches. Half believing it won’t hit the same place twice, half as a dare to the sky. We are defiant, soaked through and shivering in our thin summer holiday t-shirts, watching the clouds shift and churn. The rain, when it hits us, is like being pelted with coins.

Short story published in Test Signal by Bloomsbury & Dead Ink Books (2021)

Order your copy here

You’ll also find fiction by me available in a range of literary journals and anthologies, including Dear Damsels, Lumpen, Litro Magazine, Popshot Quarterly, Crocus Books, Hic Dragones, Dog Horn Publishing and Pankhearst.

I love performing my work, and have been featured at all sorts of events, including performing at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Exchange, Polari Literary Salon, Contact Theatre, Superbia, Stockport Pride, Edinburgh Fringe and many more.

If you’re programming a spoken word event, I’d love to be considered: please get in touch to discuss.

You can also check out my YouTube channel to see more of me performing.

Contact me here