My day job is teaching creative writing. I sometimes find myself asking students to think about the setting in their piece of writing as a character in its own right. This teacherly request falls short in many respects – it doesn’t do justice to the complex relationship between place and people in fiction and poetry …

‘New York is bullshit!’ Anonymous American Editor   There is a temptation, being from the ‘outside’ as we are in the North, to paint major international cities in a less than favourable light. If we can highlight the problems of these super cities, and there are problems, we can present ourselves as a viable and …

When Anthony Calvert, Conservative Party candidate for Wakefield, tweeted about a self-described ‘working class’ man confronting him in the street, he made the wry observation that the man said this as he was walking into a Costa Coffee. Clearly, the man could not be working class if he splurged on lattes and cappuccinos like some …

Know Your Place is a book of essays on the working class by the working class. The story of Know Your Place started shortly after Brexit and a conversation on Twitter, you can read about it here. Nearly a year later, here we are! We’ve got the book ready and now we’re raising for funds …

Before there was Hope in the Dark, there was Laughter in the Dark. By that, I mean dark humour, black comedy, a grunt from the gallows. Some trace this kind of sniggering back to the Ancient Greeks, but no doubt, it goes further still. Yet ‘black humour’ as a term wasn’t coined until 1935, when …

  “I stay away from writers who think art is a competition for fame, money, prizes, etc. What matters is the work.” – Ursula K. le Guin   Say “anarchism” to most people and they’ll envision men in black, their faces covered, throwing a flaming bin through a McDonald’s window. But anarchism isn’t only broken …

‘I Love Dick’ and other dangerous thoughts Lately, I wonder how Chris Krauss felt when family asked her about I Love Dick. I admire Erica Jong for chatting gladly about zipless fucks. For although my book is never particularly explicit, it’s got the “c” bomb chucked in there, a kinky portion of dough balls, plus …

Writing is something I want to control. Writing is something I cannot. There are times when it feels like take take take. And, honestly, a very large part of me hates it. If I could come up with a way of skipping the time between deciding what to write about and having it written down, …

We awoke bleary-eyed after a stormy night to find several tonnes of concrete had collapsed onto the railway lines going into Liverpool Lime Street Station.

We’re pleased to announce that Dead Ink has acquired the rights to the complete backlist and archive of The Eden Book Society.