WARNING SIGNS

provisional cover

31 and a bit years ago when I was 16, I signed my first book deal, with HarperCollins. By that point I was already 2 years into my media career.  That was bonkers - but it was the 90s! 

There was loads of press. Then all this stuff happened. It's now autumn 2026. 

On 25th Feb 2027, Comma Press will be publishing WARNING SIGNS, my first full length volume of new fiction in 27 years. 

Comprising 7 'long short' stories which I wrote especially for this return, WARNING SIGNS is designed to thrill, shock, transport and delight. I am looking to the whole of 2027 and 2028 for events and promotion.  Please check back here for updates as we get closer to publication time.

Comma Press editor David Sue hailed the book’s "strong and timely themes” with “expertly plotted story beats, characterisation and world-building [in] the very real though off-kilter world whose slightly distorted, unsettling reality feels so prevalent." WARNING SIGNS offers broad excitement and dark dynamism, a dash of greasepaint and limelight, a lot of fun, a little bit of cheese and some hair-raising moments with rich and complex characters, sincere protagonists and strong endings. 

I've always loved writing short stories and I had a blast crafting WARNING SIGNS, going large then cutting down and polishing carefully to dish up only the good stuff: exciting, tangy drama with strong protagonists, great interactions and vivid settings. If I can capture and enthrall readers for the length of a train journey, I’ll be happy. I haven't exactly been away from public life - quite the opposite, I'll admit - but in terms of releasing a full length volume of all-new fiction, it's been a minute. Or a quarter of a century and more. 

WARNING SIGNS offers readers seven fantastically lurid psychodramas to sink their teeth into. All seven gonzo tales of the insane and the unexpected are set in contemporary England: 

• A distinguished post-Covid NHS grief counsellor who’s obsessed with tales of the paranormal goes on a ghost-hunting reality TV show. 

• A homeless teenager finds herself in the clutches of a UFO cult in a picturesque rural tourist village. 

• A mild mannered woman runs a kitsch, death themed museum offering strange rituals in the basement. 

• A clickbait content producer goes to a psychic medium to find out her internet stalker's intentions.

• A housemaid for a venerable family suspects there might be something more to them and their faithful servants than meets the eye. 

• A wealthy businesswoman who develops military surveillance technology finds herself sorely tempted to cross a line.

• A refugee in a drug-addled seaside arts community is befriended by a totally normal children's theatre troupe. 

WARNING SIGNS follows my short film series Aurora (2020-2023), first short film An Impossible Poison (2017), my fifth book Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (2015) and the essay The Future of Serious Art (2020). You can find my overall career stuff and job factoids right here if you must. My main occupation is broadcasting on TV and radio and at live events. I am also spending 2026 doing additional work in criminal justice reform which I have a longstanding interest in. 

If you want to support me as a writer right now, my fourth book Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine (2012/2025) has been updated and reissued and can be ordered here. I haven't given any interviews or done any events around the reissue as I don't like it when individuals push themselves to the front at times like these. 

WARNING SIGNS is my sixth book. It contains shock events, extreme emotions and cathartic rituals - but it won't leave you despairing or depressed because frankly... have you seen the headlines? I wrote this to provide escape and refreshment. The seven stories feature intelligent and well-rounded people in the real world, some of whom very much want to believe in legends, myths and the supernatural, while others scoff at things like that. 

The book would be ideal for lovers of early Stephen King, Twin Peaks, Daphne du Maurier, Jane Schoenbrun's films, Jordan Peele, R F Kuang, Anna Biller, Italo Calvino, Valley of the Dolls, Alan Moore, Julia Ducournau's films, Angela Carter, Diana Wynne Jones, The Stepford Wives, The League of Gentlemen, Sinners, Marina Warner, Alan Garner, Wuthering Heights (the novel and all its adaptations, and the Kate Bush song), Susan Hill, Saltburn, John Carpenter, Shirley Jackson, The Wicker Man, Black Mirror, It Follows, Blumhouse's films, Late Night With The Devil, The Last Broadcast, Censor, the BBC’s Ghostwatch, Edgar Allen Poe, Michael Haneke, Shudder’s films, Irma Vep, Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, the TV series Atlanta, 2000s Japanese horror movies, The Babadook, M Night Shyamalan, Stranger Things, the first Twilight film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dario Argento and other Italian giallo cinema, Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, exploitation shock schlock and B movies, Ana Lily Amirpour, Possessor, Anne Rice, Hammer Horror and all contemporaries, spin-offs, spoofs, satires and jokey tributes thereof.

The stories tackle and overturn superstitions, sacrifices and shared delusions. We see social ostracism, exploitation and stigma taken to phantasmagoric ends as everyday life gives way to extreme and heightened environments. Recognisable reality, psychedelia and paranormal archetypes mix together, fantasy figures and unmet desires are made flesh and dolls and effigies feature as figures of mourning or yearning. Many of the scenes show marginalised individuals fighting for escape, recognition and survival but let me reassure you that everyone has a blast, including the reader.

I am so happy to confirm that illustrator Ben Jones has agreed to create original cover art for Warning Signs. He brings his unique style, developed through projects with everyone from The Economist, The New Yorker, the BBC and The New York Times to Politico, Prospect and History Today. Ben illustrated The Folio Society edition of The Clockwork Orange and The Secret Agent as well as creating campaigns for luxury brand Hermès (you know I love that) and projects for the Wellbeck Museum of Witchcraft, making him the perfect gothic hipster polymath to collaborate on this landmark publication. 

 I've already collaborated with Comma Press on three original fiction anthologies in recent years: 

• Resist (2020). In the story ‘Occupied Territory’, a warrior woman in Roman-occupied ancient Britain joins Boudica's liberation army and proceeds to slash and burn through the country. 

• The Cuckoo Cage (2022). In the story ‘Lady Swing’, a seemingly meek household staff member allegedly descended from witches terrorises a modern day country estate alongside a community of secret rebels and a mythical beast. 

• Collision (2023). In the story ‘Afterglow’, ambition-crazed nuclear scientists jockey for fame, funding and Nobel Prizes at CERN, with truly bonkers consequences. 

Now some career cringe backstory...

I began my career in 1993, when I was 14 and 15 (my birthday's in the middle of the year), working for some very nice style, culture and arts magazines including NME, i-D and Dazed & Confused and doing lots of fun extra stuff in art direction, styling, the art world and any radio, film, TV and presenting or commentating that came my way. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THE 90s WERE LIKE. It was before the era of unpaid internships, exploitative tryouts and using people's labour for free, so my first paychecks came to me right from the beginning.

I've worked in the mass media for the entirety of my 33 year career and also make and art direct films and photographic stills. I'm lucky in the sense that I always knew what I wanted to do. Journalism and design - words and images - communications and aesthetics - story and style.

When I was 16, in June 1995, I signed my first book deal with the Flamingo imprint of HarperCollins, after a fated chain of events: I was on the cover of a magazine that February 1995 because of my journalism - in the accompanying interview I mentioned that I wanted to write a book - Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown noticed the quote and got in touch asking if I had anything on my desk and as luck would have it, I did. The deal was made on the basis of sixty pages. I was in the first year of sixth from - Lower Sixth in Habs parlance.

Upon the announcement of the book deal there was a ton of worldwide press, all now happily lost to pre-Internet history, ha ha! All I can say is that Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls was remarkably sanguine about the whole thing, including BBC outside broadcast vans parked by the music block and tabloid journalists coming by for an interview...

That early book deal is to be credited to the agent Jonny Geller. His instincts, his drive, his clarity and capability are second to none. My first editor for Seahorses was John Saddler (now an agent) and my next was Philip Gwyn Jones (also now an agent). The PR and marketing lead was Karen Duffy. The PR for my second novel Too Fast To Live was Fiona McMorrough and the editor was Sarah Such (who is now...yep... an agent). They're all legends who are revered in the industry, and they were at the time too. This is one instance where naming names is exactly the thing to do. 

So, that's the story. It looks phenomenal from the outside and it also reflects the opportunity, optimism and fun of the era. The 90s' reputation for glamorous hedonism is 100% deserved and I enjoyed every minute both personally and professionally, often simultaneous to school and university. 

But it's not the whole picture. 

I love to be busy and I greatly enjoy public life, but I didn't like being famous and found the personalised focus unpleasant.  I'm a classic networker-communicator-connector type and it felt unnatural to take up the 'artist/star/featured name' slot, promote a product for sale and present myself to the public to be considered or speculated about. I have a lot of professional friendliness as a journalist but was unnerved by strangers' personal interest. 

The first novel, Seahorses, came out in 1997 when I was 18 and in my first year at Oxford. Events, press and lots of other opportunities follows, and huge thanks to Oxford University for their numerous allowances and tolerations. The book did well at home and internationally.  After Seahorses I published the literary thriller Too Fast To Live (2000), then focused on narrative non-fiction with Venetian Masters: Under the Skin of the City of Love (2008), Beyond the Wall (2012, updated in 2025) and Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices (2015). You might want to look at my Royal Literary Fund interview here, or my interview with Renaissance One here for some comments on writing. I'm lucky to have been translated into multiple languages. 

Over the years, I thought carefully about what kind of fiction I might enjoy and return to and from 2000 I accepted fiction commissions for short story anthologies. I'm so happy that things have come around and that I've found my groove in mainstream psychodrama with an exciting B-cult edge.  I intend to continue publishing fiction when opportunities arise and inspiration strikes.

My sole ambition for WARNING SIGNS is that readers really, really enjoy it.

FINAL DETAILS:

WARNING SIGNS will be promoted as a Comma Press lead title, with press, reviews, interviews and events - watch this space. I will be doing events and press throughout 2027 and 2028.

• I am happy to be contacted directly at bidisha.contact@gmail.com for work purposes only. I can forward messages to where they need to go, and I'll add PR contacts as we get closer to the publication date. Please read the legals.*
• Ben Jones’s Instagram handle is Ben Jones Illustration and his website is here. As you see, his work is brilliant.
• The text on this page is an extended version of the press release which is being sent to peers  - please check back for details and updates. 

*LEGALS: There is no mutual privacy or confidentiality agreement regarding emails, letters or messages sent to me. Messages can be circulated, shared, publicised, published, quoted or cited in legal action unless there is a separate agreement otherwise, in writing, by all senders and recipients. Please observe norms of professional, respectful and appropriate behaviour. 

Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015)

This article was first published in 2015.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which is the result of my outreach work with asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in the capital and includes their testimonies alongside my own account. The publisher's page is here and the Amazon UK page is here.

My latest essay on this issue is called Changing Tides and was published by Counterpoint Arts and English PEN. For Books' Sake have already given Asylum and Exile an attentive and very generous 5 star review which can be read here and there has also been some great press in Nose In A Book, a long interview in Asian Culture Vulture, another for The Festival of Ideas and another in The Heroine Collective. I've covered the project in a recent Guardian article headlined I want to give asylum seekers in Britain a chance to tell their own story; two essays for Wasafiri which can be read here and two essays for the Free Word's Briefing Notes series, called Psychogeography of trauma: inside a UK detention centre and The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain. I've also discussed the issues in my introduction to Big Writing for A Small World (Scribd copy of English PEN publication) and the articles Rape, refusal, denial, detention: refugees dancing at the edge of the world and Asylum: no woman should be missed out. English PEN have written up the debate at one of my events on this issue in a wonderful piece here and The Nation have written an article on my work called 'I came to you for help and you treated me like a prisoner'.

Asylum and Exile follows the publication, in May 2012, of my fourth book Beyond the Wall. An extensive selection of 2012 and 2013 interviews and press can be found here and a March 2014 interview by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore can be found here. 

press release

I see books like Asylum and Exile as evidence of a deep seated refusal to tolerate the divisive politics that extend right across the political divide. Well done for speaking up and bearing witness. We must never stop telling the stories of those we consign to the margins.

Maurice Wren, Chief Executive, The Refugee Council

It’s a little book, but in its pages it manages to be wide in scope yet intimate, funny, warm, sad and horrifying. ...Asylum and Exile is a 4 star read, with an additional star because it’s so fundamentally important. 

Jennie Gillions, For Books' Sake

The result of Bidisha’s outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers since 2012, Asylum and Exile goes behind the stereotypes and scare stories to reveal the humanity, tragedy and bravery – and frequently the humour – of the individuals who’ve left everything behind to seek sanctuary from violence.

The men and women Bidisha worked with were of all ages from 19 to their late 60s. All had fled war, persecution, extreme poverty and civil unrest in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Some had been in the UK for months, others for more than a decade. All spoke at least two languages. Among them were mathematicians and criminologists, soldiers, students and teachers: the man who had lectured in Persian music at Tehran university and now works in the freezer room of a sandwich factory; the woman who had been a teacher but was asked, when she arrived in England, if she knew how to turn on a light switch; the woman who became a manager in an English company only to be pulled out by police in front of her colleagues and imprisoned, who loves her red dancing shoes above all her other possessions.

In England, with no money, no access to public funds and no papers authorising them to work they labour illegally as cleaners, factory workers, dishwashers, care assistants and in other unstable, unseen, underpaid and gruelling roles. Many have bounced between prison and detention centres. Their London life is one of trying to survive on five pounds a day, of interminable bus journeys across the capital, appointments with legal aid workers and reliance on near strangers to get a foothold on life in the city with little or no support. Despite this, their unerring vivacity, talent and will to survive are a testament to the strength of the human spirit. 

Asylum and Exile comes out at a time when immigration is one of the most passionately debated issues around, with a rise in anti-immigration, anti-asylum rhetoric both in the UK and elsewhere, particularly in western Europe and Australia. Asylum seekers and refugees are being argued over, demonised, scapegoated and disbelieved – or patronised and advocated for in heart-wrenching yet generalised terms – but are almost never given a chance to speak in their own words about their own lives. Bidisha gives space to their testimonies, which are by turns shocking, moving and hilarious. She gained rare access and was met with such trust and frankness that Asylum and Exile stands as a unique document|: an accessible, uplifting and humane book whose stories are as buoyant, noisy, confrontational and diverse as Bidisha’s classroom itself.

Poster greeting arrivals at Praxis

The outreach sessions were co-ordinated by the literary and human rights charity English PEN with the Migrants Resource Centre in Victoria and Praxis in Bethnal Green. Asylum and Exile began in the unheated rooms of severely underfunded charities in London. Yet its narratives and characters cross the globe, reflecting the consequences of some of the world’s most violent conflicts and fragile states. Stereotypes and generalisations disintegrate and what emerge are the stoical spirits, vital personalities, inner strength and defiant intelligence of the individuals themselves. The book is not an academic tract or a fierce polemic but a humane account based on personal stories expressed in idiosyncratic voices, not clichés from a newspaper. Asylum and Exile is a tribute to the honesty of raw experience, the power of personal testimony and the ability of the spoken word of truth to transform both the teller and the listener.

UPDATED: Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine (2012/2025)

My 4th book Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine, originally published in 2012, has been been updated and reissued. The original publication was followed by my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, which was based on my outreach work with asylum seekers, detainees and refugees in London (click the thumbnail on the right for more details).

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine has been described as "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" by Andrew Kelly in The Observer. 

ORDER THE UPDATED BEYOND THE WALL: WRITING A PATH THROUGH PALESTINE HERE

In spring 2011 I was invited to tour the West Bank as a guest of Palfest. I knew about the ‘issue’ from casual news watching, despite a longstanding professional involvement in international relations, political analysis, cultural diplomacy and human rights. I am not Muslim and have no Muslim heritage, no Palestinian heritage and no Arab or Middle Eastern heritage. I am not an activist.

I went on the tour and wrote down what I observed, nothing more or less, and these observations became Beyond the Wall. It’s a short, accessible narrative non-fiction piece about ordinary people and daily life, originally published by Seagull Books in 2012. Full details of the original publication, with links to further essays and reviews and a list of events from that time, can be read directly below.

In the book, I focused on character and conversation, setting and community, resilience and survival, atmosphere and daily existence, with the aim of writing something which any reader could engage with.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Over the last twenty three months I haven’t mentioned Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine in any context. I dislike it when individuals push themselves to the front on a human rights ticket during an emergency. I've seen peers speak persuasively about ethics onstage while being egotistical or abusive offstage and witnessed terrible human beings put their signatures to the petitions and statements of the day, just to look good.

In late 2024 I asked Seagull if I could write a new foreword for Beyond The Wall. They kindly agreed and the essay is as current as we could make it while allowing for production time. It clearly expresses my feelings.

I will not be taking up any media slots to comment on this when there are so many direct reports and testimonies already. I’d like to thank Naveen Kishore and Bishan Samadder at Seagull and all at Palfest.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Photo of me taken in the West Bank, spring 2011, by poet Nathalie Handal

ORIGINAL 'BEYOND THE WALL' LAUNCH TEXT FROM 2012: 

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women, and another which I did for Time Out Beijing. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, Time Out Bejing, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, an interview in Ideas Tap, a long interview in The Asian Writer, Variety, a long interview in The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" (The Observer), seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

On sexual exploitation, gender and inequality in China

This is an extended version of my Times Literary Supplement essay on the Chinese writer Lijia Zhang's novel Lotus from June 2017. The original is here.

Earlier this month, as part of the Asia House Bagri Foundation literature festival, writer Lijia Zhang tackled gender, exploitation and equality in an event celebrating her novel, Lotus, about the lives of women in China’s sex industry. She was interviewed by Jemimah Steinfeld, author of Little Emperors and Material Girls: Sex and Youth In Modern China, a fresh and informative study of the sexual mores and personal expectations of the relatively privileged post-Mao generation.

Zhang was a hugely charismatic and inspiring presence, personally funny and self-deprecating but serious, well-versed and insightful about China’s challenges. As she described in her memoir, Socialism is Great!, she grew up in a housing compound with her mother, who worked in a rocket factory, as did everyone they knew. Zhang dreamed of becoming a writer and won some writing competitions, but was put to work at the rocket factory from the age of sixteen to twenty-six. “I hated my life,” she said. She taught herself English by listening to the BBC on the radio. “The government didn’t like it [foreign media] so there was a lot of interference on the frequency. But every night I glued my ears to the sound of a crackling radio.” Meanwhile, people around her mocked her ambitions: “They said it was like a toad who dreams of eating swan’s meat.” She got to London to study creative writing at Goldsmiths and by 1991 was living in Oxford, when she was asked by a Chinese publishing company to write a book about the Western impression of Chairman Mao. She said, “I interviewed plenty of people about it. But the book didn’t pass Chinese censorship. After that, I vowed only to write in English.”

Now based in Beijing, although travelling widely, she reports and comments on the complicated reality behind China’s economic success and increasing power. Zhang is hardly alone in chronicling these issues and writes alongside a number of excellent contemporary commentators: I’d recommend anything by the journalist Xinran; Scattered Sand by Hsiao-Hung Pai and Factory Girls by Leslie T Chang, which look at labour exploitation and rural-to-city migration; One Child by Mei Fong, which explores the abuses and consequences of China’s one child policy; and Leftover Women by Leta Hong Fincher, which tracks China’s increasing gender inequality.

Zhang’s novel Lotus is a rich, enjoyable read, by turns shocking, hilarious, gritty and poetic. It was inspired by Zhang’s own grandmother, who was forced to become a “flower girl” in the 1930s.  Zhang described her grandmother’s life as one of “terrible, extraordinary hardship”. She was orphaned at the age of six or seven and her aunt’s family adopted her and worked her like a slave. “When she blossomed into a beautiful young woman, her uncle sold her to a brothel, and that is where she met my grandfather. On the job. And just as you don’t associate your grandmother with a prostitute, you don’t associate your grandfather with a john.” Zhang’s grandfather, a grain dealer, later committed suicide, afraid of being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Despite her tough life, said Zhang, her grandmother “always said how lucky she was. She survived the Japanese war, the rape of Nanjing, my grandfather died, she was so poor. She brought us up. For me she belonged to the generation of older Chinese women who could take suffering without bitterness.”

Lotus is dedicated to her, although it’s set in the contemporary southern town of Shenzhen and reflects the transformations of modern China: rapid urbanisation and industrialisation; the movement of workers from rural areas to cities; the reification of money and success contrasting with poverty and lack of opportunity among the populace; the surveillance-heavy, police-state communism wrapped around a heart of fierce survivalist capitalism; increasing gender inequality decades after Mao’s edict that women “hold up half the sky”; the commodification, sale and consumption of everything from counterfeit handbags to women’s bodies.

Shenzhen is the ultimate ‘new China’ city, says Zhang: “It’s a new city, very dynamic, just across the water from Hong Kong. It’s known as a ‘mistress village’ – a place where businessmen keep their mistresses.” The idea for the novel came from a reporting trip there: “I innocently went into a hair salon to get my hair cut. The girls started giggling and admitted, ‘We don’t know how to cut hair.’ I looked on the floor and realised there were no hair clippings.” The women were from the poor Sichuan and Hunan provinces and had worked on factory production lines, but said they’d opted for prostitution because the pay and conditions were better – “and the seed of Lotus was planted,” said Zhang.

She focused on prostitution as a way to reflect China’s national quandaries: “internal migration, the rural/urban divide, tradition and modernity, the growing gap between men and women. Prostitution is an interesting window to explore social change, and a brothel is not a bad place to stage a novel because at the heart of every drama is moral conflict.”

Lotus reflects the resurgence of very old forms of sexual exploitation and sex-for-survival which Mao had once eradicated. “In the olden days, the way for a man to show his prestige and wealth was by keeping concubines,” Zhang said. “In 1949, with the establishment of the People’s Republic, the government banned all prostitution. But things changed in the [post-Mao] reform era, with growing wealth, relaxed social control and a growing hedonistic tendency.” She noted, “STDs are growing fast among older Chinese men. They’ve suddenly got money and they feel they missed out on something. Meanwhile, wives of their generation are not supposed to be interested in sex.” Asked about why Chinese men use prostitutes, Zhang said, “Power. They also say they’re lonely. And sometimes it’s young people looking for adventure.” The growth of corporate culture is also tagged to the rise in prostitution: “In China, business deals are done over dining tables. But these days, wining and dining is not enough. Prostitution is becoming the blueprint of business.”

Lotus is a humane novel honouring stigmatised, usually unheard women who are often referred to by the pejorative term, “chickens”.  Yet, according to Zhang, “Every single Chinese city, small or big, has an unlabelled red light district. The sex industry is huge in China. The more prosperous the city is, the more developed its sex trade. The vast majority of women are obliged [to work in the industry] through some very unfortunate circumstances and desperate situations. Prostitution is one of the very few options open to them.”

Zhang’s fictional characters are streetwise, brutalised into toughness, yet also full of tenderness, hope, humour and camaraderie. Her research came from forays into massage parlours and hair salons, accompanying a Tianjin-based NGO worker who was distributing condoms. It’s hard for NGOs to exist in authoritarian China, where the government prefers to be in control even of social outreach initiatives; and it’s even harder for those who try to help prostitutes.

Zhang commented that post-Cultural Revolution changes might have enabled corporate growth, but didn’t do much for social welfare or social equality: “[Post-Mao leader] Deng Xiaoping’s reforms afforded some opportunities for educated, urban women. But the market economy has undermined gender equality. The government retreated from its role and let the market take over, but the market doesn’t always treat women kindly. Women are bearing the brunt of the shift from the planned economy to the free market economy: women have to attain higher grades to be admitted to universities, women are the ones who are laid off first, women over forty-five are sacked from companies, companies can stipulate that they want only young and pretty women.”

Zhang’s research showed that prostitutes are vulnerable not just to psychotically violent men “who see them as women of loose morals who deserve to be punished”, they are also subject to police harassment and abuse. Despite prostitution being considered a social evil, said Zhang, “it’s placed under administrative law, not criminal law, so it’s dealt with through fines and sanctions. The police interpret the laws themselves. They beat up the women and extract ‘confessions’, put them in detention with no legal representation. They have leeway for corruption, abuse and a violation of the women’s rights.” Meanwhile, she said, measures to curb prostitution “don’t tackle fundamental social problems. The root of the problem is the growing gender gap and a thin social safety net.”

Having spoken in front of an avid audience of journalists, diplomats and Sinophiles (myself included – I lived for most of last year in Beijing and have been visiting China since 2014), is Lijia Zhang hopeful that gender equality will improve in this fascinating and rapidly transforming country? When it comes to change driven from the top down, she isn’t hopeful: “Female political participation is low – women make up less than a quarter of the National People’s Congress and well under a fifth of the Standing Committee. And the top level of government is just one big boys’ club.”

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers by Kira Cochrane

An extended version of a BBC Arts article I published earlier this year. The original piece is here.

It’s not often that one book weaves together the stories of a Russian cosmonaut, an American pilot, a German Resistance fighter, a Kenyan environmentalist, a Japanese mountaineer and an Icelandic pop star. Kira Cochrane’s book Modern Women: 52 Pioneers achieves such a feat. A beautifully produced, inspiring and revelatory edition of potted biographies, it crosses disciplines, countries and centuries, with one aim: to celebrate “women who led really big lives, who broke down boundaries, who make us think differently about the possibilities for women,” says Cochrane.

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers includes celebrated figures like TV mogul Oprah and architect Zaha Hadid, photographers Lee Miller and Dorothea Lange, scientists, athletes, artists and international activists “who pioneered the fight for LGBT rights, who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement, who championed equality and freedom.” Cochrane says it was important to “make sure there was a really big spread of representation, geographically and historically. I [also] wanted to bring to life the stories of women who’re often unheard.”

Cochrane is quite the modern pioneer herself. She is Opinion editor at The Guardian, one of the world’s most-read broadsheets, as well as the author of two acclaimed novels, The Naked Season and Escape Routes for Beginners, and editor of the feminist anthology Women of the Revolution.You could say Cochrane’s glittering career is an indication of how positively things have changed for women over the centuries. The acknowledgements at the end of the book are a sisterly and grateful roll call of Cochrane’s equally-celebrated women peers, colleagues and allies in the British media.

However, reading through the stories of the women in Modern Women: 52 Pioneers, whatever the woman’s profession and whatever century or country she’s working in, discrimination, sexual violence, betrayal, belittlement, abuse, marginalisation  and injustice - perpetrated against men by women - are perennial obstacles. The book reminds us how far we’ve come, how much is possible for women, and yet how much still stands in our way.  

I’m interviewing Cochrane at her home on a rare day off. At the end of the garden is a beautiful white wooden writing shed, its desk and floors stacked high with hundreds of in-depth studies of the lives and work of the women in the book. The stacks represent “this huge swathe of biographies, written by other women, over the last fifty years. What’s happened since 1970s feminism is a huge number of women authors making sure other women aren’t forgotten. It’s been a revolution on the bookshelves,” says Cochrane. 

Leaning against one wall is a huge cork board (below) of pinned black and white pictures of stars from the heyday of old Hollywood: inspiration for a possible new novel. “The best times in my life, the most euphoric moments have been writing fiction…like you were flying, like you were in another world. And that makes up for the other times when you’re agonising because you can’t make this perfect thing in your head translate onto the page.” Cochrane’s rich and ready humour and gorgeous treacly voice remind me of Frances de la Tour and indeed it’s no surprise to find out that at the very beginning of her career, it was a toss-up between acting and writing; “writing a novel,” she says, “is the closest thing to acting because you’re thinking your way into a character.”

When we return to talking about Modern Women and I marvel at the research she’s done, she says gleefully, “When I’m in, I’m all in! It was a real joy to absorb myself with the worlds of other women, who in every case were phenomenally accomplished but also courageous, who got on with it and took a risk. I’d hope Modern Women is a positive contribution to the [feminist] movement, so people can read it and feel uplifted and inspired by all the work these incredible women have done.”

Research stacks for Modern Women: 52 Pioneers

Kira Cochrane's writing shed

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers

Modern Women: 52 Pioneers by Kira Cochrane was published on 2^nd March by Frances Lincoln

Inside: the power of books in prisons

This is in response to justice secretary Chris Grayling's ban on books and other items being sent to prisoners. This article has also been picked up, here, by the human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty. For more details on Grayling's measures click here and also here and to sign a petition protesting them please click here. The writer Leah Thorn, who has a decade's experience doing close outreach work in prisons, has granted me an incredibly informative, moving and trenchant interview about prison reform, inequality, incarceration and prison culture here.

I do outreach work in prisons and also in detention centres and I have seen first hand how powerful and important books are to prisoners. Book are vital, not only in providing enrichment for inmates but as a way of connecting with others to talk through, challenge, inspire and provoke debate in a rewarding and constructive way. In all the institutions I have visited, book groups, reading groups and writing groups exert a strong pull on prisoners, who show themselves again and again to be dedicated, committed, passionate and insightful in their work and in their dealings with me and with each other.

A literary culture creates the space for civilised, meaningful relating, for social development, for questioning and self-questioning, learning, self-improvement: all the things a truly constructive prison system should represent. I have seen virtually silent prisoners linger around the edges of a group and then, through a few comments and some close reading, gain confidence, develop their skills and showcase their talent. The books are not just a source of education but also of entertainment of the most enriching and deepening kind. They are, in fact, an essential tool in tackling the poor levels of literacy and the accompanying frustration, low self-expectation, daily obstacles, narrowed opportunities and the intractable economic and social deprivation and desperately limited horizons which contribute to an environment in which petty but repetitively (almost compulsively) committed crimes are almost an inevitability. I am not talking about 'being soft' on rapists, child abusers, batterers, thug murderers, predators and woman-killers but about lifting up and liberating that great miserable body of the prison population: neighbourhood burglars, car thieves, petty hustlers, smalltime crooks, scrappers and scufflers, drug pushers who are addicts, teenage or early twenties wannabe gangsters, holders or passers-off of stolen goods. For these types, prison can be an opportunity either to become grossly influenced by malign individuals even further down the road to moral and economic corruption - or to gain some skills, judgement, backbone (as opposed to bravado) and promise, which can be taken out into the world upon release. Reading skills can contribute to ensuring that, in time, released prisoners might build a stronger and better life for themselves than they had before their sentence, not because of an increase in something nebulous and romantic like dignity but because literacy skills are vital to worldly progress.

As with all teaching, through the collective experience of reading and talking about reading, the prisoners I have worked with have taught me much more than I could teach them or they could teach themselves without the structure and focus of a book to anchor them. Certainly, we all learned a thousand times more in a couple of hours spent together daily than we would have during whole afternoons spent on the landings [where the cells are] watching daytime TV.

Furthermore I have been told directly by women prisoners with initially low literacy skills how fundamental reading has been to them. One woman told me, "My mum didn't know how to read or write, I didn't know how to read or write, that was just the way it was. So I taught myself in prison."

There is a further point, and it is gendered. I am extremely alarmed by the cruelty and punitive malice of Grayling's proposals for women prisoners with children and the suggestion that children cannot send their mothers parcels.

The overwhelming majority of women prisoners are 'inside' for non-violent crimes. The process of incarceration is mentally traumatising in itself and additionally has grave real-world consequences. In virtually all the cases that I have seen, women prisoners had been their children's primary carers and guardians, with secondary care provided by grandmothers and other female relatives. With the central source of stability and care removed and in many cases moved far from families' home towns, if female relatives cannot take on the childcare responsibilities then families are broken up, young children are put in care and a new cycle of deprivation, vulnerability, exploitation, damaging instability, lack of opportunity and circumstantial predisposition to offending begins.

We can see from all this that it is often the supposed cure, not the crime, which creates deep and long term trauma and is a key factor in the pressing issue of women prisoners' mental health and self harm. Incarceration for crimes which are more often than not the result of economic deprivation, abuse, inequality and lack of support inflicts mental wounds, drags an entire family even further down socially and creates the ground for yet more crimes to be committed - out of survival, out of necessity and out of pain.

The sense of isolation in a prison is extreme and is made perversely worse by the sheer numbers of other prisoners, guards and civilian staff. The entire non-prison world is referred to by prisoners as Outside, and the prison described numbly as Inside. Incarcerating people in a way that is mentally violent as a means of punishing non-violent crimes does not work and destroys everything, inside and out, mental and physical. There is little stimulation in a prison except for basic skills learning, a few hours of classes per day, helping out as an orderly, working in various prison areas such as the 'servery' [kitchen and canteen] or packing boxes of goods to go between prisons, sitting in front of daytime TV, idle chat and destructive scheming which is usually the result of boredom and depression. In such a context books are a humane necessity, vital for the intellect, for processing and sublimating the emotions, for socialisation, for education and for development - not a form of empty entertainment to be handed out like sweets to those who behave well. It is a fallacy that prison life is cushy, although the routine and the utter predictability and slow demarcation and regimentation of time may be comforting for those whose outside lives feel insecure, emotionally raw or unsafe. Treats, in the form of everything from letters to books to clothes and sachets of perfume or a nice top, are rare and treasured.

Receiving gifts and messages from their children and having something to talk to them about on visits - something like a story from a book - is many women prisoners' lifeline, their only source of sustained warmth and hope from the outside world. A chat about a book, gifted to a prisoner by her child, may be the only thing which makes a prison visit less frightening for that child. The prisoners pay this token of love and kindness back at Christmas time when they record stories on CDs for their children to listen to.

I hope that Grayling changes his mind and seeks more effective, more humane, less petty and less malicious ways of reforming the prison system.


For more on my prison work see this report by the Prisoners' Education Trust, this from English PEN, this also from English PEN and Rape, Refusal, Destitution, Denial on my outreach work with asylum seekers and refugees, many of whom had experienced detention and imprisonment.

The Story Ritual

The end of 2013 saw the launch of Flight Press, a new publisher of short fiction. Its first collection, Edgeways, collated the winning and shortlisted entries in the 2013 Spread the Word short story prize which I judged alongside Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman. The Edgeways anthology also featured a new short story by me, entitled The Comforting of Children, and this essay on the ritual of reading short fiction.

Everyone knows the story ritual. It begins with ‘Once upon a time’ and it ends, in childhood at least, with ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’

As we get older the stories become more complex, more shadowy and circumspect. Perhaps yearning for some comfort and familiarity we turn back to the fairytales, fables and adventure stories we knew from childhood, only to realise that even they contain striking ambiguities and subversions. Bluebeard: wife killer. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood: murderer preying on the elderly, human eater, sartorial necrophiliac and cross-dresser, child groomer. The prince in Cinderella: foot fetishist. The prince in Rapunzel: hair fetishist. The prince in Sleeping Beauty: rapist. Snow White: female masochist who finds happiness as seven men’s domestic drudge.

Even these stories, with their generic, Disney-colonised contemporary names, arise from rituals of recounting adventures, creation myths and folklore which long predate written culture and are strongly echoed by countless narratives all over the world. They are full of death, betrayal, selfishness, desire, heroism, ambition, bloody-mindedness, defiance, friendship, sadness, enmity: the stuff of life. The stories embody near-universal hopes and fears, provide escape, give warning, reprove or reward certain desires. They reflect both the time of their telling (and retelling) and the universality of our own impulses.

The story ritual isn’t about whether the narrative is committed to paper or to the air and the ears. It’s not even about literature, as such. Journalists and news crews pursue emerging stories, fashion spreads in high-end magazines are referred to as stories, private investigators try to get to the bottom of a story and witnesses of crimes give their stories to the police. Con artists have their stories too, often very elaborate ones. Part of the ritual is that you follow a story, if it’s a good one, all the way to the end. The mark of a rich tale, whether it’s epigrammatic or epic, is that you want to know what happens next. And if that ending is weak, the reader feels not irritated but actually betrayed. We are galled and disappointed, as if we were set up in good faith and then sold a dud.

I’m always intrigued by nurseries and prep schools that have a soft-furnished, quiet, special story corner, as if stories deserve their own place as well as their own time in which to flourish. Similarly, the ritual of parents reading their kids to sleep, which always struck me as incredibly narcissistic on the part of the adults, is a memory apparently cherished by many. My own childhood story ritual was listening to a tape of The Snow Queen every night as I attempted to drift off. The sound of the queen flying up to the children’s attic window, tapping on the glass and keening their names in a ghostly voice is one of my most harrowing, vivid recollections. It was only fiction, but fictions provoke real reactions.

Later, I was given a wonderful hardback book of hundreds of stories, each exactly a page long. One was about a young woman with waist length blonde hair. She was so tired of being teased (or as we say these days, sexually harassed) about it that she tried to dye it black in the kitchen sink. It turned green and she was mocked even more badly when she went to school the next day. I never quite worked out the moral of the story. Either it was ‘just be yourself’ or ‘just be sexy’.

Readers have rituals: they read before bed or on a long afternoon, in the chair they always use, or on the commute to work. They do or don’t fold pages, break spines, underline things or read the last paragraph first. Writers also have rituals, some more OCD than others. I know some who kiss their copies of Pablo Neruda or George Eliot when beginning a new book, put a lucky charm on their desk or, getting to the trickier end of common behavioural disorders, make sure they’ve washed their hands three times before they touch the computer keys. Others go to their study with just the right cup of tea and just the right biscuit.

We are hoping that if we get the ritual right, it’ll repay us in words, in inspiration, in insight and good judgement. All of us are striving to write that one, perfect, satisfying thing. Every word has to count, every shift has to happen at the right moment. It goes deep yet seems light; it’s a structure of iron hung with silk. I once met a writer whose story had won a competition I co-judged. She hadn’t expected to win. ‘I just wrote it in a week,’ she said, exhilarated and disbelieving. I reeled back. It takes me months.

The story ritual is so powerful that we carry its psychological imprint with us for the rest of our lives, even to the point of naivety. We assume that our lives will have a coherent narrative balance, moral shape, emotional form. We go into our thirties and forties believing that things will always work out in the end, with a natural karmic equilibrium; that we will fall in love, perhaps even at first sight like so many fictional characters; that we deserve or are justified in pursuing adventure; that any event or act can be explained and therefore understood; that any pathology or feeling can somehow be decoded. We assume that this mysterious thing called karma will eventually repay the balance of evil and good. We believe that every story we live through must have an appropriate end, which we call ‘closure’, and that we can bring this about as though we are protagonists. It is from stories, nothing more, nothing less, that we believe that everything that has begun will be ended, and will end somehow fittingly. This does not happen often in reality, yet still we keep the faith.

I had to come to faith sooner or later. Underlying all world religions is an indissoluble trinity of faith, story and ritual. The great books of nearly all the world’s major religious belief systems are really just short story collections presented either as emblematic myths or as faithful accounts of true events. And all the rituals of the world’s religions are built on those stories, and everything we believe is built not on the evidence of our own eyes but on stories. Angels and other supernatural harbingers do not exist. The Garden of Eden did not exist. A man cannot walk on water. A god can’t have ten arms or four arms or a monkey’s head or an elephant’s head. The part-animal sentinels and judges of the Egyptian underworld do not exist. But it doesn’t matter. We read the stories, we heed them and we invest them with meaning, regardless of whether they are true or possible. We extrapolate their conclusions, build them into morals and use them to structure the laws, beliefs, values and customs of societies of billions of people. We use the stories to justify both our violence and our generosity, our exploitation and our humanity, our abusiveness and our self-sacrifice. We perform various rituals we invented, inspired by the stories, and have done so for thousands of years. That is the power of the story ritual: to underpin, explain and motivate human society for as long as we have existed.

Further reading:

• All Bone and Muscle, an essay on the art and craft of short fiction which I wrote for the University of Chichester’s short story module. 

Spread the Word about a gorgeous new anthology called Edgeways

Carol Ann Duffy and Warsan Shire
Photo (c) Spread the Word

I've worked with and admired the London based literary organisation Spread the Word for as long as I can remember. Spread the Word support the city's most exciting writing talent, seek out new voices, organise public panel discussions about topical issues in literature and publishing, launch writing competitions, support the development of new work and generally inspire creativity and energy in anyone who encounters them. This autumn, their great achievement was to bring to public notice one of the most thrilling, searing and original writers I've ever read - the poet Warsan Shire, who is the inaugural poet laureate for London. Read the BBC's coverage of her appointment here. As The Bookseller and The Evening Standard report, her appointment was announced by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. I believe that Shire, along with Malika Booker, are the two most exciting poets and riveting performers creating in the UK today.

Totally fab image of Malika Booker taken by Naomi Woddis for Femficatio.
Visit the source site by clicking here.

After many years of hosting panel discussions with critics and authors, mapping the changes in the industry and encouraging fresh work from hundreds of writers, both emerging and established, Spread the Word are stepping up and becoming publishers in their own right. Introducing.... Flight Press:

I love that inky, indelible looking black block-printed star and punky grassroots Soviet template font. Initially producing sleekly formatted e-books, Flight Press plans to create limited edition, lovely-to-have-and-hold publications like the gorgeous volumes made by Pereine Press and & Other Stories, who published the 2012 Booker-shortlisted breakaway hit, Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, which I discuss here in an essay entitled Even The Rich Suffer.

The debut release by Flight Press is an anthology called Edgeways. Initially an e-book, the anthology brings together the winning and shortlisted writers of the 2013 Spread the Word writing competition for short fiction, which I judged alongside the writers Courttia Newland and Tania Hershman. In judging fiction I am always reminded that talent is not scarce but common. It's waiting to be discovered and is richly deserving of a platform, publication, critical attention, readerly celebration and support from the wider industry.

Courttia Newland's fiction is passionate, topical, fierce; he writes with urgency, great observation and grit. Tania Hershman's short fiction combines cerebral intensity, bullseye imagery and technical precision. And I'm super company at lunch. The winning story in the competition was Living It Edgeways by Claire Sita Fisher. We loved it for its upfront, fresh, mobile voice and impeccable creation of character. The story's narrated by a young guy whose humour and streety restlessness hide perceptiveness and vulnerability. Fisher's story was cut through with witty observations about city life, street slang and the effects of one incident on an entire family.

Edgeways the anthology has been edited by Courttia Newland, who's written an introduction about the competition's shortlisted entries, explaining what we were looking for, where we agreed and where we politely diverged. Tania Hershman has also contributed a piece of her unutterably perfect short fiction. The competition entrants whose pieces made the shortlist are Claire Sita Fisher with her winning story, Nick Black, KJ Orr, Toby Litt, Deirdre Shanahan and Saradha Soobrayen.

I have contributed an essay called The Story Ritual, about the art and craft of the short story. I've also written a new story entitled The Comforting of Children. It's my first work of original fiction since Dust, in November 2011. The success of that story, which can be read here, reprinted by the University of Chichester, gave me the faith to write The Comforting of Children. I can't think of a better way to explore the craft of short fiction than by being a small part of  new anthologies whose originality make such a strong case for the power of literature and the excellence, diversity and prevalence of new voices.

Further reading:

• All Bone and Muscle: an essay on short fiction written for the University of Chichester short story syllabus. 

Edgeways is available now as an ebook, published by Flight Press and edited by Courttia Newland. 

Hyeonseo Lee’s North Korean escape and rescue memoir gains six figure book deal

Hyeonseo Lee, whose memoir will
be published in Autumn 2014

Hyeonseo Lee escaped the North Korean regime. Later, she risked her life to return and rescue her mother and brother. Her memoir of these events has now been acquired by Arabella Pike, Publishing Director at William Collins UK, in a six-figure deal following a hotly contested auction among numerous publishing houses bidding for the rights. Arabella Pike says that the book “has electrified everyone here …and in our US office.” She describes it as “powerful, deeply emotional and important” and adds that Hyeonseo Lee “will be, I believe, the first eyewitness female writer to describe the terrifying fates of North Korean women escapees in China.”

The deal was brokered by Kelly Falconer of the Asia Literary Agency, based in Hong Kong. And that’s why Kelly’s my agent. She comments,

This is the story not only of Hyeonseo's escape - literally from the darkness into the light - but also of her coming of age, of her "re-education", of her ability to successfully rebuild her life not once but twice, first in China, then in South Korea, which proved to be the more difficult of the two. Thousands of refugees and escapees pour out of North Korea but thousands also struggle to adapt, and rarely do they thrive, as Hyeonseo Lee has.

The book is due to be published in Autumn 2014. Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish rights have been sold at various auctions by Pontas Literary Agency, acting on behalf of the Asia Literary Agency, with other offers currently under consideration.

Buzz about Hyeonseo Lee has been building for months following her TED talk, which detailed her escape from North Korea and has gathered over 2 million views online. It is viewable here:

As a child, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country was ‘the best on the planet’. It wasn't until the devastating famine of the 1990s that she began to question what she had been taught. She escaped to China when she was 14 and began a life in hiding as an illegal alien. The book, as yet untitled, will describe her privileged childhood in North Korea, her life in China, her decision to settle eventually in South Korea and her journey back to North Korea to rescue her mother and brother. She is now at university in South Korea and is a human-rights advocate and spokesperson for the North Korean refugee community.

Selected further reading about North Korea

• Barbara Demick, Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
• North Korean defector, Kim Young Soon, reveals conditions inside state's concentration camps (Huffington Post)
• Out of a hidden place: two new books, one personal, one political, let daylight into the hidden kingdom of North Korea (Economist)
• North Korean memoir tests South's interest in refugee stories (Wall Street Journal)
• North Korean 'court poet' to publish memoir (Guardian)
• Four memoirs portraying the realities of modern day North Korea (Mapping Worlds)

Press release text (c) Flatcap Asia, with thanks to Kelly Falconer for exclusive quote.