It’s been my pleasure to be involved with a number of podcasts focusing on reading and/or translation in recent months in various capacities – as a guest, interviewer and producer. As such, I thought I’d give a roundup of some of my favourites, not least because I suspect people who like this blog would enjoy them.
The Books Up Close podcast is a reading nerd’s delight, focusing on all things close reading. It’s hosted by poet and academic Chris Lloyd, who is not only an expert on contemporary US literature, cultures of the US South and cultural memory but also a wonderful reader and interviewer. I was very honoured to participate in an episode devoted to my latest book, Relearning to Read.
Meanwhile, from Hyderabad comes the wonderful Harshaneeyam podcast, long-form conversations with leading authors and dedicated readers to document the heart of modern Telugu fiction and other aspects of cultural exchange. It was my joy to be a guest a few weeks back and spend an hour exploring the pleasures and challenges of not-knowing.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the microphone, I have the privilege of producing the Collected podcast from the Royal Literary Fund, a UK charity set up in 1790 to support writers. We’ve had a wonderful array of guests, including Elif Shafak, Hanif Kureishi and the Rwandan genocide survivor and prolific author Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Two of my favourite recent episodes are interviews with award-winning translator and author Daniel Hahn, and a conversation I had with Daisy Buchanan, author of Read Yourself Happy.
If you get a chance to listen to any of them, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And if there are any books-based podcasts you think I might appreciate, please let me know!
For anyone who’s interested, there’s a rare opportunity to join one of my Incomprehension Workshops online next week. Hosted by the Interfaith Center in Oxford, Ohio, US, this virtual, 90-minute workshop is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. Simply register here.
Full details below. Hope to see you there!
The Incomprehension Workshop with Ann Morgan
Thursday, July 16th, 2026
11:30 AM PT | 2:30 PM ET | 7:30 PM BST on Zoom
This 90-minute interactive session explores how focusing on what we can’t explain might enrich and broaden our understanding of reading, culture and ourselves. Turning the school literature comprehension exercise upside down, we’ll consider a range of extracts from books likely to be outside the comfort zone of participants and play with the questions, problems or reactions that come from not knowing how to read them. As we work through the material, we’ll explore the effects (both good and bad) that assumption and bias have on reading, the idea of embracing discomfort and the opportunities that paying attention to the gaps in our understanding opens up.
Last month I had the honour of introducing the Indie Press Network’s spring showcases, two virtual events presenting some of the key titles coming out from small presses in the UK and Ireland in the next few months. As indie presses have long been the heartland of translated literature, I was only too pleased to have the opportunity to hear publishers present some of the books they’re most excited about. (The events were recorded, so if you’re curious, you should be able to watch them online soon.)
Among the many books that appealed to me was a forthcoming title from Moth Books: Clearing by Iris Wolff, translated from the German by Ruth Martin. Martin’s name was the thing that first piqued my interest – I often find that the involvement of certain translators can be a great measure of a project’s quality and I have long been an admirer of her work. I was also pleased to hear that this was the second title by Wolff to be published by Moth – the sort of publisher loyalty that makes a huge difference to an author’s reach, and is increasingly rare and precious among bigger houses. As Clearing only comes out next month, and as I prefer to review older books on this blog anyway, I decided to seek out the earlier novel.
Centring on a German community in rural Transylvania during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule, Blurred, also translated by Ruth Martin, is the sort of book big publishers in the UK are unlikely to touch. Because anglophone publishers have traditionally required that books from elsewhere declare their cultural identity clearly (usually set in the country in question and featuring tropes that complement readers’ preconceptions of what life in that place is like), this book’s focus on characters living in Romania rather than Germany would make it problematic to pigeonhole and market in the way that mainstream publishers favour.
The work’s distinctiveness doesn’t end there. The book opens with a note to the reader written directly in English by Wolff, setting out her motivations for writing the story, which draws on her own childhood in the Banat region, and some of her thinking on the purpose of fiction and the nature of time. ‘Writing is a rebellion against time and its greatest impertinence, transience,’ she tells us. ‘I see time not as a directional force but as juxtaposition, concurrence, as an organic web.’ This direct address intrigued me: in all my years of reading internationally, I can’t recall another comparable piece by an author who doesn’t normally write in English. Did the original contain a similar foreword? And if not, why had Wolff felt it necessary to preface her work in this way?
Because, really, the story needs no introduction. The writing is immediate and immersive, opening with Florence travelling through a snowy landscape to deliver her son, Samuel, in a forbidding labour ward beholden to the dictates of Ceaușescu’s ruthless pronatalist policies (which turn out to be the death of Florence’s friend Nika). Harsh and beautiful, ‘this landscape lets you be who you are’. Yet the life lived among the German community is a stripped-back, shrinking existence, in which an innocent visit from a stranger may invite interrogation and torture.
Through it all, Wolff’s humaneness shines through, evident in a deep care for her characters. Indeed, when the pastor Hannes reflects on the nature of empathy, we might be hearing Wolff speak through him: ‘how easy it was to define empathy: if someone is suffering, he feels what I do when I am suffering’. This book vibrates with compassion; Wolff feels with her characters just as the German word ‘Mitgefühl’ implies.
So it is that many of the novel’s most moving moments come when we see characters processing profound losses and shifts. The end of a relationship, the decision to abandon home and family in the hopes of a better life in the west, the reunion with a longlost love – all these things are experienced quietly and privately, with the reader given privileged access to those at the centre of events’ thoughts. ‘There were different kinds of loneliness,’ reflects one after his lover leaves him. ‘The loneliness of the mountain that had always been there. Of the wide-open plain where you felt lost. Of the city and its indifference. There was the loneliness of the staffroom, the overcrowded tram, the empty flat. The loneliness brought on by accusations, accompanied by words like “never” or “always”, no matter whether they came from other lips or your own.’
And yet, for all the loneliness depicted in its pages, the characters of Blurred are profoundly connected across time and space, even if they can’t always see it. This is where Wolff’s views on time make themselves felt. Although broadly chronological, the narrative seems more like a spiral than a straight line. Samuel’s decision to flee his homeland with his friend Oz comes relatively late, and once the pair arrive in the bewildering, capitalist west – where there was ‘so much of everything, two things had to be done at the same time: jogging and pushing a pram; watching TV and talking to guests’ – the past echoes through them. Events are diffused into their lives, features recur down the generations, patterns repeat.
The role of storytelling is also a theme, with narratives’ malleability and necessity for human survival considered by turn. Occasionally, I found myself wishing that Wolff had trusted her readers to infer a few of the technical insights she spells out, which can sometimes feel a little pointed and knowing. But this may simply reflect a difference in the appetite for this kind of exposition in the German readership, or simply my taste.
Overall, this is a great book: engrossing, moving and beautifully told. Credit is due to Ruth Martin for the line she has walked in infusing the narrative with a ‘subtle flavour’ of its varied language world, as she explains in her postscript. And credit to Moth Books for publishing this novel, and to all the indie houses who do so much to bring stories that take us further into English.
Blurred by Iris Wolff, translated from the German by Ruth Martin (Moth Books, 2025)
Eight months after the launch of the paperback of Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-knowing, the ebook edition has hit the virtual shelves.
It’s been lovely and humbling to see responses to the book so far. Prospect magazine called it ‘a genius move… In 12 short chapters it rips up the rules about reading and reminds us about fiction’s greatest strength: that it lets you step out of your life and, if you’re brave, out of your safe literary spaces.’ The Big Issue said it is ‘a fascinating exploration of the reading process, what it can achieve and how it shapes us’. Meanwhile, in the cover story of The Times Literary Supplement earlier this year, Christy Edwall wrote: ‘What matters most to [Morgan], laudably, is creating the conditions in which her readers will “view reading as a more active, connected, and radical pastime.”’
There have been some wonderful endorsements from fellow international literature champions and authors, too. These include: superstar translator and author Anton Hur; novelist, translator, professor and former English PEN president Maureen Freely; leading Irish novelist and international literature critic Rónán Hession; and award-winning writer and podcaster Daisy Buchanan.
It’s also really encouraging to know that the paperback is nearly sold out and recently entered its second printing, with a new double cover featuring some of these responses.
The ebook edition adds a fifth book jacket to Relearning to Read’s wardrobe (well, sixth, if you count the rogue 200 copies printed the wrong colour that we gave away through Cheltenham Literature Festival and the Jhalak Foundation), joining the three versions of the paperback, and the special Renard Press Edition that dashed out of print ahead of the paperback release last year. Unlike its printed siblings, the ebook cover shows words highlighted, as on an ereader screen. It’s available from all the usual places, while the last remaining first editions of the paperback can still be snaffled direct from Renard Press.
Many thanks to everyone who has helped give the book such a warm welcome. In the coming weeks, I’ll be taking the incomprehension workshop that inspired it to Cambridge University and Belfast, with events planned in Cheltenham, Sandgate and Southwold later this year. Maybe I’ll see you there?
This book came onto my radar during the brilliant event about writing female experience I attended at Hong Kong International Literary Festival earlier this month. The panel featured three local authors, who spoke arrestingly about how they capture the pressures facing young women in Hong Kong today.
As soon as I heard the premise of the title story of Ysabelle Cheung’s debut collection, Patchwork Dolls, I was hooked. The story centres around young, marginalised women in a scarily believable version of New York, who sell their features to be grafted onto the faces of wealthy, white consumers keen to keep up with the latest Instagram trends. Indeed, as Cheung explained during the event, the story was inspired by Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker essay ‘The Age of Instagram Face’. I snapped up a copy of Cheung’s book and devoured much of it on my flight home.
One of the many things to admire in this collection is the sense of a hallmark running through it. Although this is Cheung’s debut, its voice and identity are deeply assured. Cheung’s specialism is near-realist dystopias – skewed portraits that show us our world in a slightly distorted mirror by walking now a few nightmarish steps down the road. There is the recluse who becomes infested with ‘head fungus’, and a letter from a woman forced into a life of continuous displacement sharing recipes with the great-granddaughter she will never meet. There is the matchmaking agency that parachutes strangers into identikit apartments and the app that allows bereaved people to track the ghosts of loved ones. The stories roam around the planet, taking in versions of Hong Kong, London and New York, as well as unidentified landscapes ravaged by consumerism and climate change.
It sounds bleak – and it’s certainly true that a ‘latent type of horror’ pervades many of these stories, as well as a righteous anger at the mess humans have made – but the collection is playful, ingenious and surprising too. In the great-grandmother’s letter, for example, Cheung raises several smiles by crashing together notions of survivalism and tradition with futuristic technology. ‘If you do not have these tools in the future, a laser crusher will survive’, the narrator instructs her descendant-to-be.
There’s also a choose-your-own-adventure story. I have to admit my heart sank when I saw this. I’ve never enjoyed this sort of book (although, admittedly, my experience of them isn’t vast – if you can recommend a good one, please do, especially if it’s translated) and as the mother of young children, I have been held hostage on more than one occasion by rambling stories about unicorns, cake and glitter, where my main concern has been to game the system so as to get to an ending as quickly as possible.
Perhaps mindful that selecting what happens next isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, Cheung appears to give the reader the option of skipping this story, also called ‘The Reader’. ‘Dear reader,’ she writes. ‘If you prefer to continue this story collection in the traditional way, please feel free to turn to the next story after this one. If you’re up for a little adventure, however, please proceed to the next page.’ And of course, in so doing, she ensures that all of us – even those who, like me, aren’t fans of this sort of fiction – give ‘The Reader’ a try, because who wants to think of themselves as the sort of person who isn’t up for a little adventure? (Indeed, as the title suggests, the whole story is really about us and our responses, encouraging us to notice what goes into our decision-making and what we look for as we work our way through texts.)
This sort of psychological astuteness is part of what makes Patchwork Dolls special. The author is attentive not only to her characters and the worlds they inhabit but to the responses of her reader. There is a wonderful humanity and pathos to the stories, as well as an uplifting hopefulness. This may be a world where nature is compromised and where boundaries are continually breached – where phones ‘grunt’ like living things and people use one another like objects. These may be visions of a reality in which, like the prospective great-grandmother, we grieve ‘being so much less of ourselves – so reduced in our want for the future’. But there is still beauty, even if it comes from surprising, even repulsive, quarters – in the lustre of discarded bits of parasitic fungus, for example. And there is still possibility: the fact that the great-grandmother writes her letter shows her conviction that there will be a future, no matter how tough and precarious, and there will still be pleasure to be had from taking care over the preparation of food.
The fact of Cheung writing is similarly encouraging. She and her fellow panellists, Kaitlin Chan and Karen Cheung, were forthright and open about the challenges facing their generation, particularly young women. Yet they saw these as a spur, rather than a barrier – something their writing could tackle and expose.
At the end of the acknowledgements to Patchwork Dolls, Cheung lays bare the motivations for her work: ‘And finally, to the teacher who said I would never learn to read; the magazine publisher who made me doubt my own words; the men who followed me home from school; and the authoritarian figures who dictate what we can, and cannot, write and say. You gave me a reason to write these stories.’
I look forward to seeing what Ysabelle Cheung does next.
Patchwork Dolls by Ysabelle Cheung (Blair/Carolina Wren Press, 2026)
My engagements there began with an intense schedule of school visits. Jetlag notwithstanding, I was picked up at 7.15am on my first morning by one of the festival’s brilliant team of volunteers, a committed network of writers and book lovers based in Hong Kong. Over the next three days, I Ubered around Hong Kong Island, delivering ten talks and incomprehension workshops at schools everywhere from the lofty heights of the Peak to Tai Po.
The institutions I visited were a mix of government-funded ‘public’ schools, international schools and English Schools Foundation schools. I was told I might experience quite a difference in response from place to place, particularly as English is a second-language for many students at the public schools.
In truth, though, enthusiasm and sparkiness were evident everywhere. At one girls’ school, where a teacher had warned me the students were often shy, my incomprehension workshop proved a riotous hit, with everything form the Epstein files to six-seven coming into the discussion. At another public school, a teacher who started off sitting to one side couldn’t help jumping up and joining in with great excitement. Afterwards, he told me with emotion that the session had taken him back to his student days and reminded him what he loves about literature.
As my books are for adults, I never usually do events for primary school children. Consequently, I was rather surprised to arrive at one school and find 60 ten-year-olds waiting for me. Apparently, the pupils there had looked at the speaker brochure and picked me out as someone they particularly wanted to hear from. I adapted my talk accordingly and we had a wonderful session about reading stories from around the world that finished with a forest of hands up to ask questions.
There was a similarly enthusiastic response at the literary festival, at which I did three events. I ran my incomprehension workshop with a small but engaged audience at the very cool Fringe Club. As ever, the discussion generated some mind-blowing responses, showing me new things in stories I have worked with many times before. Several participants shared afterwards that the workshop had allowed them to confront fears and vulnerabilities they had long held about their relationship to reading.
The next day, it was my privilege to chair a panel discussion with three translators at Hong Kong’s Goethe-Institut. Local German-English translator and novelist Nicholas Stephens, Chinese-English translator and novelist Jacqueline Leung and poet Dong Li, who translates between German, French, English and Chinese, shared their insights into their craft. The discussion was wide-ranging and lively, taking in everything from AI to authenticity, and it laid bare the extraordinary humanity and generosity that underpins human translation.
My final event at the festival (pictured at the top) was perhaps the most special of all: a conversation with Jennie Orchard, the editor of The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, to which I contributed an essay last year. Jennie was the reason I was in Hong Kong, as she had recommended me to festival director Laura Mannering. She graciously focused the discussion on my new book, and it was a treat to unpack some of the things that have unfolded over the 15 years since I started this blog in her company and in front of a warm and generous audience who bought up every last copy of Relearning to Read in the festival shop. The timing of the event was auspicious too: both our books had just been featured unexpectedly in an article on reading in the UK’s Times Literary Supplement, so it was wonderful to be in conversation in person as well as on the page.
My schedule being rather full, my time for literary exploring at the festival was limited. However, I did manage to attend a really interesting discussion with the Argentine-American writer Hernan Diaz, who spoke about how his career in academia had made him alive to the ‘viscosity’ of language and had very interesting things to say about his perspective on the stories countries tell about themselves: ‘What is a national history but a very hardened cliche?’ I also picked up some great recommendations for Hong Kong writers and was thrilled by an event featuring local authors Ysabelle Cheung, Kaitlin Chan and Karen Cheung talking about writing female experience.
I have a feeling this may prove the source for my next Book of the month. Watch this space…
Good news! If you’ve been wanting to try my incomprehension workshop, your chance has come! I’ll be offering a virtual taster session and chatting to super reader, blogger and all-round translation champion Marina Sofia at 7.30pm (UK time) on Tuesday 20 January 2026.
Over the past few years I’ve run the workshop with readers of all ages from 10 upwards around the world, most recently for the fourth time at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (pictured above). The sessions are usually ticketed or run in-house for organisations, so this is a rare opportunity to try it from the comfort of your own home for free.
If you haven’t heard of the incomprehension workshop, it’s the basis of my new book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-knowing. Prompted by the realisation that no-one can be an expert on all the world’s stories, it invites readers to play with how paying attention to what we don’t understand can help us read ourselves and our world better.
It’s out! My fourth book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing, officially hits the shelves today. It’s available worldwide in English and can be ordered through all the usual channels and bookshops, as well as directly through my publisher’s website.
Drawing on the interactions I’ve had through this blog and through the reading workshops I’ve been running for the last four years, it explores how embracing not-knowing can enrich our reading of ourselves and our world.
Each chapter takes an extract from a different book likely to be outside most anglophone readers’ comfort zones as a launchpad for exploring themes such as how do we read books written from political viewpoints or based on religious views we don’t share? What do we do if we don’t know if a story is funny? And why might taste sometimes lead us astray? I hope it’s playful, mischievous, a bit subversive and thought-provoking.
In the spirit of this, the book comes in three slightly different covers, reflecting the fact that there is more than one way of reading. If you order one, you won’t know what you’re going to get! And as a bonus, Renard Press is running a promotion: if you add Relearning to Read and the signed, limited-edition version of my novel Crossing Over to your basket on their website, and use the coupon ‘relearning’, you’ll get the novel half price. The offer runs until the end of October, so hurry if you like the sound of this.
Every book will have its pound of flesh – at least that’s my experience. This one certainly had some twists and turns in the early days of developing the idea. Once I had the form clear in my mind, however, the writing process was a joy.
There’s been some wonderful feedback. We’ve already had an international rights inquiry from a publisher in another territory. (If you would be interested in translating or publishing the book in another language, please drop Will at Renard Press a line.) Relearning to Read has already been included on the syllabus of a university course in the UK and I’ve been invited to speak about it at festivals in the UK, India and Hong Kong.
What’s more, I’ve been particularly thrilled to see writers I admire supporting the book with generous endorsements. These include superstar translator and novelist Anton Hur, who called Relearning to Read ‘a lively discussion on how to read books from around our increasingly fractured world – and how to live within the chaos,’ and novelist, professor, translator and former English PEN president Maureen Freely, who wrote:
‘Living as we do in the golden age of surveillance marketing… it has become ever more difficult to negotiate uncertainty – in life as on the page. With this beautifully imaginative guide, Ann Morgan makes an eloquent case for reading beyond the bounds of our understanding, not just to broaden our horizons, but to better understand ourselves. I shall be taking it to my next book group! I urge you to do the same.’
Not everyone has been impressed, however. When I told my eight-year-old that my fourth book was being published today, she pulled a face. ‘What? You mean you’ve only written four books in your adult life?’ she said.
Still, I hope other family members approve. In particular, my Dad. Sadly I can’t ask him: he died unexpectedly as I was preparing to write the final chapter, and this changed the shape of the ending a little. One of the earlier chapters also features the story of how his father, a native Welsh speaker, moved into the English-speaking world. I hope Dad would have enjoyed reading it.
Certainly Dad would have enjoyed the international angle. Travelling was one of the things he most wanted to do in retirement. He had renewed his passport a few weeks before he died and was looking forward to several trips.
I have dedicated Relearning to Read to his memory. As it sets off around the world, it makes me smile to think that, in a way, Dad is travelling with it too.
Many of those I interact with about books through this project, both virtually and at my Incomprehension Workshops, are young people. Even now, all these years after I set out to read the world, I sometimes find my inbox flooded with messages from students whose teacher has asked them to write to me recommending a story. A while ago, I received a wonderful video from a young boy in Beijing advising me to read a book that explained why tomatoes can sometimes be quite dangerous.
So it was a delight to be invited to contribute an essay to a new collection celebrating the importance and joy of reading for children and young people. The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation is the second such anthology put together by editor Jennie Orchard. Like the first volume, The Gifts of Reading, it was inspired by an essay by the UK nature writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the foreword to this new collection.
Other contributors include such household names as William Boyd, Michael Morpurgo, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Imtiaz Dharker and Horatio Clare, and all royalties go to Room to Read and U-Go. Founded by John Wood, these organisations promote literacy and education for girls and women. Indeed, U-Go’s aim is to fund the university education of 100,000 young women in the world’s lowest income countries.
We celebrated the UK publication of The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation with a launch at London’s Daunt Bookshop. Also published in the US and Australia, the collection is widely available.
BUT I have one copy that I am happy to sign and send anywhere in the world. If you’d like it, simply message me or leave a comment below telling me about a book you gave or received that was important to you.
Last Thursday, I had the unusual experience of giving a paper at an academic conference. The event was about the future of English studies, and I was there because of a call for papers put out in association with Wasafiri magazine, a British publication championing international contemporary writing. I suggested that I might speak about my work with embracing not-knowing in reading, which forms the basis of my Incomprehension Workshops and forthcoming book, Relearning to Read. The organisers liked the sound of this, and so, last Thursday morning, I found myself joining other speakers and delegates in the gracious surroundings of York’s Guildhall for the start of the three-day event.
The University of York’s Professor Helen Smith opened proceedings, saying that she felt the event was about survival and finding positive ways that the field of English studies could continue. As an English literature graduate myself, I was a bit taken aback – surely the subject couldn’t be in so much trouble?
But as the discussion opened up and academics from universities across the UK began to speak, it became clear that there are many challenges facing those teaching English literature, language and related disciplines today. From the declaration last year that the English GCSE isn’t fit for purpose and the increased testing of performance all through school, to the encroachment of AI on students’ work practices, the sector seems increasingly restricted and hobbled.
The main issue, as several of the people sitting near me said, was a lack of joy in the classroom these days.
This made me sad. For me, reading has always been about joy. I was eight when I decided that I wanted to study English literature at university, having been entranced by L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Reading was magic, it seemed to me. I couldn’t imagine a better thing than spending three years reading stories. How miserable to think of today’s young readers having all that pleasure squashed out of them.
Still, when I thought about it, I could recognise what was being said. Last year, I ran an Incomprehension Workshop at a sixth-form college near where I live in Folkestone. It being World Book Day, I started the session by asking participants to write down how they would complete three sentences:
Reading is…
The world is…
Stories are…
At the end of the session, I invited students to read out what they’d written. One said this:
Reading is boring
The world is crazy
Stories are exciting
It was clear that something of that disconnect the university lecturers were describing had happened for that sixth-former. Although they still felt the power of stories, this had somehow become separated from reading for them. Books were not the source of connection and electricity they had been for me.
I hope my panel helped propose some ways in which that gap might be rebridged. Titled, ‘Incomprehension and Living Between’, it opened with Turkish writer and translator Elif Gülez reading from her memoir about the culture clash she experienced growing up. The extract was powerful and resonated with the small but highly engaged audience, showing how personal narrative can cut through barriers and make experience live in other minds.
Then, I spoke about incomprehension and how I try to foster a spirit of play in my work with this. I was particularly touched when one audience member said afterwards that the demonstration I had given had taken her back to the wonder of reading like a child once more.
Lastly, we were joined remotely by Indian academic Gokul Prabhu, who delivered a fascinating paper on ‘Queer Opacity in Translation’ – considering how the attempt to make things legible and understandable may sometimes work against the spirit of a text, and how translators may sometimes need to leave gaps and jolts in work that does not intend to make its meaning plain.
There was a marvellous electricity in the room, and this carried on into the afternoon, in a session on teaching creative writing, chaired by poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo, whose work-in-progress memoir I read as my Trinidadian pick back in 2012. The panel featured four writers who all teach at UK universities: J.R. Carpenter (University of Leeds), Joanne Limburg (University of Cambridge), Juliana Mensah (University of York), and Sam Reese (York St John University).
They were honest about the challenges facing the industry and sector, but so full of enthusiasm and powerful insights that it was impossible not to be encouraged. I was particularly struck by Carpenter’s statement that a poem ought to unfold in the same way that it was gathered up, although, as Mensah observed, this idea is faintly terrifying when I think about the chaotic nature of my own creative process!
I came away heartened to think that the academic branch of the field I love has such people working in it. And grateful that so many of those labouring under such pressure at the UK’s universities felt it was worth taking three days out of their hectic schedules to consider how better to foster and share a love of reading stories.
I also felt a renewed energy for and commitment to the possibilities of embracing not-knowing and incomprehension too. More soon!
Picture: ‘Municipal Offices and Guildhall, York, North Riding of Yorkshire, England’ by Billy Wilson on flickr.com
