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Review: Dark Wonders by Joshua Helmer

Dark Wonders is a set of three linked dystopian short stories from Nottingham-based writer Joshua Helmer. Comparisons to Black Mirror are easy to make, as the three stories involve a dark insight into a near future in which different forms of technology have an impact on humans and the world. However, underneath this genre similarity, …

The Myth of Individualism

In the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s latest book Humankind, he researches a real-life version of Lord of the Flies. In June 1965, six boys from Tonga floated out to sea in a stolen boat, and found themselves washed up on a desert island for fifteen months. Unlike William Golding’s novel, however, which ends in brutality …

Lakeside Literacy Volunteers: The David Ross Collection

This blog post was written by third year Creative Writing student Matthew Lewis Miller from the School of Education. A few months ago, Clare Harvey and Ruth Lewis-Jones rudely interrupted one of my valuable university morning classes to tell me about the Lakeside Literacy Volunteers. I am very glad that they did. Over the last …

Just a Gigolo

A few years ago I wrote a play called EMPTY BED BLUES about D.H.  Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, which centred around the “true” – if somewhat controversial – story that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was inspired by Lawrence’s painful discovery of his wife’s love affair with Angelo Ravagli, their gardener in a rented villa in …

Kerry Young: The Challenges of First-Person Narration

Kerry Young came to the university to read from her debut novel and to speak about writing and publishing. Originally from Kingston, Jamaica, she has spent much of her career focusing on the writing and editing of non-fiction such as The Art of Youth Work and other professional publications, as well as chapters and articles …