October 2017
Brixton BookJam at 8pm on Monday 2nd October 2017 at our regular venue The Hootananny, Brixton. We heard from Nick Harkaway, Miranda Gold, Alex Cristofi, Barry Stewart Hunter, Alyssa Warren, Dave McGowan, Rosie Wilby, Bonnie MacBird, Hamja Ahsan, Erinna Metler, Jack Blackburn and Josh Winning. You can listen to a podcast of the event on Soundcloud.
The Writers
Nick Harkaway is a novelist and commentator. He is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker and Tigerman; and a non-fiction study of the digital world, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. His new book Gnomon deals with a state that exerts ubiquitous surveillance on its population. A detective investigates a murder through unconventional methods that leads to questions about her society’s very nature.
@harkaway / www.nickharkaway.com
Miranda Gold is a writer based in London. Her first novel, Starlings, published by Karnac in December 2016, reaches back through three generations to explore how the impact of untold stories about the Holocaust ricochets down the years. She has taken part in Jewish Book Week and was on the panel for ‘Reading as Alchemy’ at Waterstones Gower Street. Before turning her focus to fiction, Miranda took the Soho Theatre Course for young writers, where her play, Lucky Deck, was selected for development and performance. She will be reading from her second novel.
@mirandagold999 / A Small Dark Quiet
Alex Christofi was born in Dorset and read English at Oxford University. As well as working as an editor, he writes occasional essays and reviews. His first novel Glass, also published by Serpent’s Tail, was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Betty Trask Prize. He will be reading from Let Us Be True – which charts the lives of these two extraordinary characters through an era of great uncertainty, from WW2 and its aftermath through to the deadly unrest of 1960s Paris.
@alex_christofi / www.alexchristofi.com
Born in Aden, Barry Stewart Hunter grew up in the Middle East and Scotland. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Something You Once Told Me, and a novel, Aden (October 2017), a ravishing story of love, loss, ambition and betrayal set against an end-of-empire backdrop of revolution. As well as featuring in literary reviews, his stories have been collected in anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. A graduate in screenwriting of the National Film and Television School, he lives in London.
Alyssa Warren spent a muddy, scruffy, happy childhood in the creeks and abandoned homesteads of South Dakota, before completing a BA in English Literature at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, and an MA at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has taught creative writing and modern British literature at the Universidad San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador, and has served as a contributing editor for Surface magazine, covering art, design and fashion. She is an artist, printmaker and photographer based in East London, where she lives with her husband and three sons.
@alyssagwarren / www.alyssa-warren.com
Dave McGowan was born and bred in South London. He is host and co-founder of In Yer Ear – a popular London literary event, and author of Putting It Away, a series of short short stories featured on The Birkbeck Writers’ Hub: http://www.writershub.co.uk/fiction-piece.php?pc=2223
Comedian, author and broadcaster Rosie Wilby has appeared many times on BBC Radio 4 and at major festivals including Glastonbury and Latitude. She was a finalist at Funny Women 2006 and Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year 2007 and has been touring award-winning solo shows internationally ever since. Her writing has been published in The Sunday Times, New Statesman and more. Her first book Is Monogamy Dead? (Accent Press) is getting rave reviews and follows her TEDx talk of the same name.
@rosiewilby / www.rosiewilby.com
Bonnie MacBird was born and raised in San Francisco and attended Stanford University, earning a BA in Music and an MA in Film. Her long Hollywood career includes working as a feature film development exec at Universal, writing the screenplay for the original TRON, and winning three Emmy Awards for documentary writing and producing. Bonnie fell in love with Sherlock Holmes reading the canon at aged 10, and has turned that passion into a Sherlock Holmes trilogy published by HarperCollins. Her debut novel, Art in the Blood, was published in 2015 and released in 14 languages. The sequel, Unquiet Spirits, is out now.
http://macbird.com / @macbird
Hamja Ahsan is a South London based writer who has just published his debut book SHY RADICALS: AntiSystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert. It is a speculative fiction book based on an imaginary political party like the Black Panthers but for Shy People.
He has presented at Forest Fringe festival (Somerset House), a launch at Rich Mix in mid May, Tate Modern OffPrint and various literary nights.
https://www.bookworks.org.uk/node/1917 / @hamjaahsan
Erinna Mettler is a Brighton-based writer. Her first novel, Starlings, was published in 2011 and was described by one critic as doing for Brighton what The Wire did for Baltimore. She is a founder and co-director of The Brighton Prize for short fiction and of the spoken word group Rattle Tales. Her stories have been published internationally and short-listed for the Manchester Fiction Prize, The Bristol Prize and The Writers & Artists Yearbook Award. Erinna’s new short story collection on the theme of fame, Fifteen Minutes is out now with Unbound.
www.erinnamettler.com / @ErinnaMettler
Jack Blackburn is a performance poet and portrait painter who lives in south London. He has never done much with his life other than fuck around.
Joshua Winning is an author and film journalist who writes for Total Film, SFX, Gay Times and Radio Times. He has been on set with Kermit the Frog, devoured breakfast with zombies on The Walking Dead, and sat on the Iron Throne while visiting the Game Of Thrones set in Dublin. Jeff Goldblum once told him he looks a bit like Paul Bettany. As a journalist, he has interviewed some of the most exciting names in the film industry, including Jodie Foster, Ryan Reynolds, Charlize Theron and Christopher Lee. Joshua’s dark fantasy series The Sentinel Trilogy is published by Peridot Press. His new book, Killing Rumer, is crowdfunding at Unbound.
http://www.joshuawinning.com @joshwinning
