From Victoria MacKenzie’s Substack, partly on Old Filth: “The novel deals with what is probably my favourite subject of novels - the discrepancy between a person’s public life (and how they are perceived by those who scarcely know them), and their secret inner lives - their real lives, to my mind.”

Vicky MacKenzie@vickymackenzie.bsky.social · 3d ago

Good god, it's August already. The monthly Substack newsletter is now live, I know you've been on tenterhooks... open.substack.com/pub/victoria...

Right. I have written a personal essay of about 4000 words on turtle doves, the nature writer Richard Jefferies, time, mortality, and parental care. It needs a home. Any suggestions?

Good god, it's August already. The monthly Substack newsletter is now live, I know you've been on tenterhooks... open.substack.com/pub/victoria...

Short Story Judging, Two Great Novels, My Guided Book Group

Things I'm writing, things I'm reading, things I'm teaching...

open.substack.com

My post on twelve excellent books worth considering for #WITMonth featuring authors such as Samanta Schweblin, Han Kang, Marlen Haushofer, Inès Cagnati and more. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2026/07/30/w...

TONIGHT! Be there, fish poem lovers! 🐟

Vicky MacKenzie@vickymackenzie.bsky.social · last wk.

Garry's online launch for 'Firth' is THIS WEEK! Free to attend, 7.30pm on Thursday, book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-lau... Chaired by wonderful poet and musician @rebeccasharp.bsky.social #BookSky #Poetry

Last week the posy I brought home from the garden had a chrysalis attached though I didn't notice till I got home. If you, like me, haven't watched a butterfly emerge you won't be prepared for how amazing or how long emergence takes #TinyJoys a 🧵

One of my favorite albums of 2026, it makes you thrilled to be alive Northern Irish producer Hannah Peel teams up with Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang to create genre-defying orchestral soundscapes & epic percussive dance floor slayers hannahpeelmusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-en...

The Endless Dance, by Hannah Peel

9 track album

hannahpeelmusic.bandcamp.com

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Annie Dillard, The Writing Life.

From temperate rainforests to tidal pools, @sophiepavs.bsky.social's fascinating journey through the British Isles is a celebration of the hidden relationships that keep our natural world alive. 🐚🌍 To Have or To Hold is out now in paperback!

Whilst the cost of living crisis continues to spiral, with food and fuel prices soaring, so do global oil and gas companies profits. Shell has today announced it's profits have more than doubled. This is obscene. www.reuters.com/business/ene...

Shell profit more than doubles to $9.8 billion, second-highest on record, as Iran war lifts prices

Shell's ​net profit more than doubled from last year to $9.84 billion in the second quarter, beating expectations, helped by ‌higher energy prices and increased market volatility during the Middle Eas...

reuters.com

Soft opening tonight… lovely to be back selling books. ❤️📚🙌🏼

Snap! An honour to endorse this book of perceptive, beautiful essays by @cclarklewes.bsky.social. WHAT LIES AHEAD is out now from @blackheraldpress.bsky.social.

Joseph Schreiber@roughghosts.bsky.social · 7d ago

In the post, a fine collection of essays by @cclarklewes.bsky.social. And I am unlikely to ever write a book, but I am still thrilled to have my name on the (back) cover. @blackheraldpress.bsky.social

East Durham coal miner just home from the pit, 1937, photo by Bill Brandt (1904-83).

A month ago, my new essay Who Are The Fire Tamers? about the secret world of traditional French healers, Sontag, Bachelard, bodies and medical care, was published in @aeon.co. Since, I've been contacted by readers from around the world. Today, this beautiful comment was left. aeon.co/essays/who-a...

New on the blog today, WOMEN WRITERS IN TRANSLATION - some book recommendations for #WITMonth. Featuring books by Mariana Enriquez (tr. Megan McDowell), Irmgard Keun (tr. Michael Hofmann), Claudia Piñeiro (tr. Frances Riddle) and more! #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/07/29/w...

Women Writers in Translation – some book recommendations for #WITMonth

As many of you know, August is #WITMonth (Women in Translation), a celebration of books by women writers, initially written in languages other than English and then translated for English-speaking …

jacquiwine.wordpress.com

There's new Alice Oswald coming: “I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin... The word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all."

Rhapsody: A Manifesto

A daring, genre-defying work of nonfiction from one of our greatest poets. Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form—before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice—and finds it still speaking all around us. “I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin. . . . The word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all,” she writes. What begins as an attempt to “interview” Homer becomes a wide-ranging exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners, and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers, and rivers. Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence, and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition. At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognize poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.

ptreyesbooks.com

In that spirit - hey, please sign up for my guided book group, I'm running out of money for bills and food and that! victoriamackenzie.net/teaching/

Teaching

Experienced creative writing tutor offering mentoring and editing services. Also available for readings, Q&A sessions, workshops and residential courses.

victoriamackenzie.net

Lev Parikian@levparikian.bsky.social · last wk.

Companies: stop sending “hey dude, we haven’t seen you for a while, we missed you, are you ok?” emails when you actually mean “WE NEED YOU TO BUY MORE STUFF FROM US URGENTLY RIGHT NOW PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING WE NEED YOUR CASH”

Really glad to see @lukekennard.bsky.social on the Booker long list. That is all I have to say.

Garry's online launch for 'Firth' is THIS WEEK! Free to attend, 7.30pm on Thursday, book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-lau... Chaired by wonderful poet and musician @rebeccasharp.bsky.social #BookSky #Poetry

Online Launch: Firth by Garry MacKenzie

Join us to celebrate the online launch of Garry MacKenzie's ambitious new poetry collection Firth.

eventbrite.co.uk

The Irish Pages Press@irishpages.bsky.social · last wk.

The count-down is on! Please join us this Thursday for the online launch of Garry MacKenzie’s superb new #poetry collection, ‘Firth’ 🌊 Full details below 📚 @vickymackenzie.bsky.social

‘Mystification is both M. John Harrison’s subject and his method. It’s an approach that throws up some obvious technical problems. How to frustrate understanding without sacrificing interest?’ Edmund Gordon 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, longlisted today for the Booker Prize. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Edmund Gordon · Uncanny Little Blighter: M. John Harrison’s​ ‘The End of Everything’

‘What’s the point of an alien artefact you can recognise?’ Harrison asked in Wish I Was Here. ‘As a branch of...

lrb.co.uk

ICYMI, from the @themothmagazine.bsky.social newsletter: "If you're looking for something to dip into this summer, why not consider treating yourself to a bundle of timeless back issues of The Moth?" Gorgeous! 💙 www.themothmagazine.com

The Moth | Welcome to The Moth

themothmagazine.com

Today’s lunchtime read in the shrub behind the industrial wasteland. One I’ve been meaning to get to for a while!

🎉We are thrilled that Makenna Goodman’s HELEN OF NOWHERE has been longlisted for the 2026 @thebookerprizes.com 🎉 Read an excerpt from the book here: fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/helen-...

Ooh! Nice one @lukekennard.bsky.social, I really need to get round to reading BLACK BAG. 📚🏆 (As usual I've read nothing from the longlist, and the only one I own is Helen of Nowhere, but I will probably read a few of them within the next 20-30 years..)

The Booker Prizes@thebookerprizes.com · last wk.

Presenting the Booker Prize 2026 longlist. Find out more about the books and authors that make up this year's Booker Dozen: thebookerprizes.com/bp2026

Wonderful to see @lukekennard.bsky.social's praise for Donald Antrim's My Eliot. ‘Perhaps one of the most sorely missed novelists of the last couple of decades for his humanity, intelligence & deceptive lightness of touch...Made me laugh, made me cry, made me wish I had my own enchanted parsnip’

Garry's online launch for 'Firth' is THIS WEEK! Free to attend, 7.30pm on Thursday, book here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-lau... Chaired by wonderful poet and musician @rebeccasharp.bsky.social #BookSky #Poetry

Online Launch: Firth by Garry MacKenzie

Join us to celebrate the online launch of Garry MacKenzie's ambitious new poetry collection Firth.

eventbrite.co.uk

The Irish Pages Press@irishpages.bsky.social · last wk.

The count-down is on! Please join us this Thursday for the online launch of Garry MacKenzie’s superb new #poetry collection, ‘Firth’ 🌊 Full details below 📚 @vickymackenzie.bsky.social

Just an illuminated cat catching an illuminated mouse in an illuminated manuscript from around 1300. #bookhistory

Good grief, this hits home.

Jeffrey Epstein models Zuckerberg's Meta glasses. Spoof advertisements featuring the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein wearing Meta’s AI glasses have been installed at bus stops across London in a guerrilla campaign protesting against privacy risks. The activist group Everyone Hates Elon

Spoof Epstein ads go up around London in protest against Meta AI glasses

The activist group Everyone Hates Elon targets smart glasses in a guerrilla campaign over privacy risks and non-consensual recording

thetimes.com

Farewell Bill, most radical of the Goodies. Present at Grosvenor Square with Tariq & Vanessa. Turned his harassment by the Met into slapstick TV comedy for kids. Angry, hairy, furiously talented.