Venue: The Music Room, 49 Great Ormond Street, WC1N 3JL.

Tickets are priced at £5. The ticket price includes £5 off Issue 10 of The Lonely Crowd (r.r.p. £9) and complimentary drinks & snacks. Note: Tickets will not be on sale on the door but must be either purchased or ordered in advance.

The Lonely Crowd: London Readings: £5

About the Authors

Gary Budden is a writer and editor. His book of uncanny psychogeographies and landscape punk, Hollow Shores, was published in 2017 by Dead Ink, and his dark fiction novella Judderman (as D.A. Northwood) was published in 2018 by the Eden Book Society. His short story ‘Greenteeth’ was nominated for a 2017 British Fantasy Award and adapted into a short film by the filmmaker Adam Scovell.  His work has been published widely, including in Structo, Black Static, Unthology, Gorse, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

Fiona O’ Connor is a former Hennessy Short Story Award Prize winner. Her recent work includes a play commissioned by Kerry Council Arts which was performed at the Etcetera Theatre, London. The play, she had a ticket in mind, was written in support of the Repeal the 8^th campaign and won the 2018 Eamon Kelly Bursary for storytelling. She has won or been shortlisted for a variety of writing competitions including The London Short Story Prize. Her stories are featured in The Stinging Fly, Honest Ulsterman, Autonomy, Fiction International and Crannog. She is a regular contributor to The Irish Times books section. She lectures at The University of Westminster.

John Freeman is a prize-winning poet and critic whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies over several decades. His most recent books are What Possessed Me (Worple Press), and Strata Smith and the Anthropocene (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), both published in 2016. Earlier collections include A Suite for Summer (Worple), White Wings: New and Selected Prose Poems (Contraband Books), Landscape with Portraits (Redbeck Press) and The Light Is Of Love, I Think: New and Selected Poems (Stride Editions). Stride also published a collection of essays, The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets. What Possessed Me won the Roland Mathias Poetry Award as part of the Wales Book of the Year Awards in November 2017.

Dai George’s first collection was The Claims Office (Seren, 2013), an Evening Standard book of the year. His work has been published in Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The White Review, The Guardian and elsewhere. He is an editor at Poetry London and Prac Crit. This is a selection from his second collection, Karaoke King.

Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in West Wales, and is a Welsh speaker. She has various pieces of short fiction published or forthcoming in print and online, and her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, will be published by Dead Ink Books in 2019. She has an MA in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, and has worked in the advertising, marketing and public relations industries. She lives in Herefordshire with her husband and three children. She likes Herefordshire, but she’d rather live in Europe.

Toby Litt was born in 1968 and grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. He has published novels, short story collections and, most recently, a memoir called Wrestliana (Galley Beggar) about his great-great-great grandfather, William Litt – a champion wrestler, smuggler, exile and poet. Last year, Toby was one of the poets included in Carcanet’s New Poetries VII anthology. His new novel, Patience, will be published by Galley Beggar in August 2019. When he is not writing, he likes to read, play guitar and do nothing.

Grahame Williams is from County Down, Northern Ireland. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, the Letters Page and in 2014/15 he received an Arvon/Jerwood Mentorship for fiction writing. His current work in progress is a novel about a father, a son and the construction of a giant girl in the last of the Belfast shipyards.