‘Writing police wrongs’ at Housmans

Having just taken ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’ to Galway in Ireland for my event at the TULCA Festival of Visual Arts (guest-curated this year by Daniel Jewesbury), I am really looking forward to bringing it back to London, where I am taking part in Housmans Bookshop’s ‘Writing police wrongs’ event on Saturday 26 November with Courttia Newland.

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Housmans approached me with the idea of doing an event following my reading at the London Radical Bookfair back in May, and so I am very pleased—together with Courttia Newland—to have been able to take up their invitation. If you don’t know it, Housmans promotes the work of authors and organisations whose ideas and messages are in keeping with the shop’s progressive and pacifist ethos. One of the central ways in which they do this is via their evening events at the shop. Courttia’s and my event continues their new regular series of events focusing on poetry and on radical and alternative literature, The Locomotrix, ‘Where the I is the public, where the I is things, where the I is the things that happen…’

Here’s the blurb:

London authors Courttia Newland and Tony White both burst on to the literary scene in the late 1990s. Since then their paths have crossed occasionally, most recently when they discovered that they had each been writing fiction which addresses—each in their own ways—the controversial issue of deaths in police custody in the UK today.

Courttia Newland will be reading his powerful short story ‘Reversible’ from the new Sex and Death anthology edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs and published by Faber and Faber. Tony White will be reading ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’, a short story which uses the language and performance of contemporary law enforcement and policy to frame a satirical proposition that has been described by one audience member as ‘jaw dropping’.

The readings will be followed by discussion. Newland and White are both accomplished readers of their fiction, so come along to Housman’s to hear, and to be entertained and provoked—and to chat with—two of the best contemporary novelists around.