Niamh MacCabe reads two new poems from our special anniversary issue. The Lonely Crowd · ‘And Her Father’ by Niamh MacCabe Niamh MacCabe is an award-winning writer and visual artist, with experience as collaborator and director on many multi-disciplinary art projects. She is published in over forty literary journals and anthologies in Ireland, the U.K.,…
Angela Graham reads her two poems from our special anniversary issue. The Lonely Crowd · Winter Readings: Two Poems by Angela Graham After Iconoclasm: A Reflection on Technique The emptied niche is a womb, Perpetually conceiving And the great window, burst, A stone-stringed larynx And the gouge-marks on the eyes of saints Record in…
Justine Bothwick reads ‘Tenderness’ from Issue 12 of The Lonely Crowd. Justine Bothwick grew up in Kent and Hampshire, and studied in London. She is a graduate of the Manchester Writing School’s Creative Writing MA programme and has short stories published in Fictive Dream, Virtual Zine, Confingo Magazine, and forthcoming with Nightjar Press. Her work…
Contributors old and new to The Lonely Crowd choose the books that they have most enjoyed reading in 2020. Given the nature of the year, not all of these titles were published in 2020. David Hayden Here are some of the books I read, and reread, this year, which made a difference to me. African…
Contributors old and new to The Lonely Crowd choose the books that they have most enjoyed reading in 2020. Given the nature of the year, not all of these titles were published in 2020. Hisham Bustani Inua Ellams, The Actual It is surprising how much writing in general, and poetry in particular, have succumbed to…
Jaki McCarrick reads ‘Blackbird’ from Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. Jaki McCarrick is an award-winning writer of plays, poetry and fiction. Her play LEOPOLDVILLE won the 2010 Papatango Prize for New Writing, and her most recent play, THE NATURALISTS, premiered in New York to rave reviews: “Best Bet” International Theatre, Theatre is Easy; “Impeccable,…
Laura Wainwright reads her two poems from the special five year anniversary issue of The Lonely Crowd. Laura Wainwright is from Newport, Wales. Her poems have been published in a range of magazines, journalsand anthologies. She has been shortlisted in the Bridport Prize poetry competition twice and awarded a Literature Wales Writer’s bursary in 2020…
‘Because Angela said to you often, ‘My Mam is dead,’ in a way that sounded like she wished your Dad was dead.’ Watch Aoife Casby read an extract from ‘The Skink’, her new short story in Five Years: Issue Twelve of The Lonely Crowd. Aoife Casby lives on the west coast of Ireland where she works as a writer, editor and visual artist.
Craig Austin discusses his story in Issue Twelve: Five Years. This is a tale about what it feels like to be an outsider, geographically, culturally, and ultimately emotionally. It’s a story that’s materially set in the Midwestern state of Ohio but one that’s psychologically rooted in the metropolitan city of Boston, Massachusetts; a place that,much like Liverpool, exists as a state of mind as much as it does a bricks and mortar conurbation. A city that righteously defines itself as much by what it’s against as what it’s for. The Beantown pubs and bars referenced within it, The Hub Pub, The Silvertone, are no works of fiction and I heartily…
Contributors old and new to The Lonely Crowd choose the books that they have most enjoyed reading in 2020. Given the nature of the year, not all of these titles were published in 2020. Marc Hamer One of the books I have read this years that has stayed with me is Teaching a Stone to…
Contributors old and new to The Lonely Crowd choose the books that they have most enjoyed reading in 2020. Given the nature of the year, not all of these titles were published in 2020. Mary Morrissy History dominated my reading this year, perhaps because the present was so insupportable. Plague crept in, regardless, particularly in…
‘Tin’ is a commissioned story and, therefore, I approached and wrote it differently to the stories that occur to me in a natural way. Firstly, the story had to be designed to be read aloud. BBC Radio Ulster and 14-18 NOW – the UK’s arts programme for the First World War centenary – asked a…
Down the years there has always been an ease between Patricia and Malachy that’s hard for others to slip between. It’s as if they have an invisible rope that binds them and no one can get beyond it, not even me. Their attachment didn’t bother me overly much before, but I’m the woman of the house now and I won’t have Patricia sharing soft looks with my husband. Mrs Cahill from down the way – who has watched out for us since Mammy passed – told me I need to announce myself. So I rise now and step away from the table; I place Patricia’s old cushion onto the settle by the wall and I sit into Mammy’s chair by the fire.
Mary Morrissy discusses ‘Repossession’, her new short story in Issue Twelve of The Lonely Crowd. Getting the right title for a story is important and there’s usually an ‘aha’ moment when you find it, or it finds you. With ‘Repossession’ this moment never came, so as far as I’m concerned, it is still a…