NOVEL
SMALL ACTS OF COURAGE – shortlisted for the Retreat West Novel Competition.
Published June 2020 - Townhead Press.

SHORT STORIES
PEAL OF BELLS – won 3rd prize and publication in the Fylde Brighter Writers Short Story Anthology.
SCARS – short listed for the Wells Literary Prize.
THE PIG – longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, The Yeovil Prize, the Fiction Factory Prize and the Scottish Arts Club Prize. Published 2020 in LIFE ON THE MARGINS.
 
POETRY
2 poems published in The Lit Room Antholgy THE ARTIST’S TALE
5 poems published in DREICH #9
2 poems published in SOUTHLIGHT MAGAZINE


Being Human
 
Today I learned
that when an iceberg breaks away from the mass,
we say it has been calved,
as in birthed -
torn from an ice mother with a crack and a surge of blue water.
 
Above the surface,
peaks and ledges dusted white with snow.
In the depths below,
ten times the tip,
the dark crystals of its bulk hold the silent stories of centuries.
 
I think of babies
born in pain and bright blood.
How being human is the balance
between what is shown and what is hidden.
That the challenge is not to freeze but to thaw.




Devil’s Toenail
 
It’s age called to me,
challenged me with a gnarled conundrum.
 
Jurassic oyster, weighty on my palm,
curled in my curled hand.
 
Washed to tactile smoothness by interminable tides.
The ebb and flow of eternity.
 
Holding it, I feel my impermanence,
the speck of time I inhabit.
 
I feel miniscule.
A grain of sand in a boundless universe.
 
And the sudden joy that a mollusc fossil,
a worn stone that once was life can do this.
 
Can carry through millennia
the living gift of wonder.