Happy New Year everyone! Hope you enjoyed the holidays. I’ve mainly been hanging out with my kids, eating Quality Street and watching panto, Celebrity Gladiators and Wicked. 2025 is going to be a year of poetry for me, with my first collection in eight years, Lives of the Female Poets, coming out with Bloodaxe. I’m also currently Artistic Director of the Winchester Poetry Festival, which we’re very pleased has received funding to go ahead this autumn, and of course I’m hoping to build this substack over the year with more of my readalongs…
You might have noticed, though, that I have currently paused paid subscriptions. This is for two main reasons - the first is that I kept thinking I needed to post up exclusive paid content, yet having to regularly write a blog specifically for just 9 paid subscribers (the current number) seems like a bit of a burden to put on myself when I’m already busy - I was also thinking it would be a kind of online workshop, but I’ve just agreed to run one of these for the Poetry School a little later this year (details to follow) and I don’t want to have to run two simultaneously.
Secondly, I keep reading posts about how if anyone takes a paid subscription from abroad you can fall into a ‘tax vortex’ and have to fill out lots of gnarly tax forms and pay sales tax to the EU etc. This sounds like a NIGHTMARE - I absolutely hate foreign tax forms - and definitely not worth the very small amount of money paid subs are currently generating for me. So many thanks to those of you who wished to support my writing but I’m pausing paid subs for now, and concentrating on building up the free subscriber list for a bit at least. If anyone wants to support me and this content, please just preorder Lives of the Female Poets instead.
Some links in the meantime. I was on two podcasts before Christmas, both of which I enjoyed immensely. One was GRIMM READING, a fantastic fairytale podcast, where I talk about my latest novel The Modern Fairies. The other was HELLISH, which is kind of like an anti-Desert Islands Discs where you name your least-favourite tracks, which was incredible fun.
I was also featured on Claire Fuller’s great Books Under the Radar feature, recommending underrated books.
And talking of underrated books, I am currently reading Virginia Woolf’s book Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog! I can’t remember who recommended it to me, but thankyou. It’s such a pleasure to find a Woolf I haven’t read, and it’s a slim, playful book very like Orlando, which also works as a commentary on the lives of women writers, perfect for cosying up with in bed on winter nights (I don’t know why but I always crave a classic at this time of year).
Lots more poetry coming up - I’ve a review to write this week, and I’m very much looking forward to attending the T.S. Eliot readings at the Southbank on Sunday (hope to see some of you there). And if you’re in Cambridge I’m taking part in this eco-poetry event, Seeds in the Dirt, on Wednesday 15th January. In the meantime, do let me know if you have any strong feelings about what the next readalong should be in February…