Helen Sedgwick

Our friends at Literature Alliance Scotland have opened applications to the pilot programme, To Be Continued.
Have a look and see if this could help you or send to someone who might also benefit.
Applications close Friday 3 October 2025. literaturealliancescotland.co.uk/to-be-contin...

Really looking forward to the online launch of ‘The Man Who Made Up Trees’ by Michael Greavy - the winner of Magma’s 2024 pamphlet competition on Wed 1st Oct 7-8pm.

Discounted copies available on the night!

Register your free place here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/pamphlet-l...

One of Britain’s most senior police officers has launched an angry tirade against Extinction Rebellion protesters going “all floppy” when they get arrested. Sir Stephen House, the deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said the tactic of going limp was a “flipping nuisance” as it required extra officers to drag protesters away. House told a London assembly police and crime committee hearing: “We have asked them to stop being floppy. And that might seem like a silly thing to say, but when we arrest them and pick them up, they go all floppy, which is why you see four or five officers carrying them away. It’s a complete waste of officers’ time, and a complete pain in the neck.” Extinction Rebellion: how successful were the latest protests? Read more House also expressed annoyance at how the tactic made the police look heavy-handed. He said: “The problem with them going floppy and four offices carrying them away [is that it] looks to the general public like police are overreacting here. We’re not making them go floppy. They’re just sort of being a nuisance.”

This gets progressively funnier with every use of the term "floppy".

Ingrid in short hair, wearing a turtleneck sweater, smiling at the camera.

Ingrid Bergman was born on this day in 1915. She also died on August 29th - in 1982.
📷 David Seymour, 1953

"Love would come right through that lens."
- Pia Lindstrom

Nature is Not Going to Cure You: On Raynor Winn’s Fabricated Memoir Like many writers, I have been following the unfolding revelations about Raynor Winn and The Salt Path with great interest, and a degree of self-interest. I am a memoirist and nature writer, and I …

I keep getting asked for my salty thoughts about the Salt Path as my position on nature cure narratives is v clear! A mere fraction of those thoughts published here @literaryhub.bsky.social, with thanks to @bookwormvaught.bsky.social and @nicwilson.bsky.social for their earlier pieces linked below.

"Publishing is attached to the idea of a narrative arc that peaks with healing...

Nature writing has long had a problem with the way it presents illness. Nature writing only wants to admit illness into its pages if it is to show nature performing a miraculous cure."

Excellent piece

Information on our project researching Gaelic Medium Education and career outcomes can be found here:

As Bookbanks new Ambassador I’d like to spread the word about this brilliant charity giving books with food at food banks.

Please share and support if you’re able :)

www.bookbanks.co.uk

Among yesterday's arrestees is Deborah Hinton, an 81-year old retired magistrate with an OBE.
That's Yvette Cooper's idea of a terrorist.
Language has been turned on its head.
The law has been turned on its head.
Murdering children is righteous.
Trying to stop it is terrorism.

Remember all that fulminating in the billionaire press about "free speech" (ie their freedom to abuse Muslims, trans people etc with impunity)? Now that people are being arrested for speaking about an issue of the utmost gravity, the self-appointed guardians of liberty have fallen strangely silent.

Oh hell no. WeTransfer now claims access in their T&Cs, in perpetuity, to your content to “improve the service and our technologies (and develop new ones)”.

I used to use them to transfer large manuscripts, but looks like I’m jumping ship. Other large transfer sites are recommended in the comments.

Inklings submissions open from 1st to 31st August - Saraband Inklings submissions open from 1st to 31st August

In case you miss it amongst the news, we're delighted that @saraband-books.bsky.social will be continuing the Inklings series and they open for submissions in August! The process is very similar to our own but check out the guidelines and get your pitches ready.

saraband.net/2025/07/11/i...

Very sad to hear @404ink.bsky.social are closing, but they deserve a massive congratulations - they’ve been a shining light in the industry and have worked with unending passion. I’m delighted @saraband-books.bsky.social are taking on Inklings. A HUGE well done to Laura & Heather for everything!

Following the announcement of 404 Ink's closure, we're delighted to announce that we'll be taking forward a significant portion of the Inklings series!

Read more here:
saraband.net/news-events

#Booksky
📚💙

Film review by Jorge Luis Borges of KING KONG (1933): King Kong: A monkey fourteen meters high (some of his fans say fifteen) is obviously charming, but perhaps that is not enough. This monkey is not full of juice; he is a dried out and dusty contraption with angular, clumsy movements. His only virtue-his height-seems not to have greatly impressed the photographer, who persists in not shooting him from below but from above, a plainly mistaken angle that invalidates and annuls his tallness. It should be added that he is hunchbacked and bowlegged, features that also shorten him. To ensure that there is nothing extraordinary about him, they make him fight monsters far stranger than he and find him lodgings in fake caverns the size of a cathedral, where his hard-won stature is lost. A carnal or romantic love for Miss Fay Wray brings to perfection the ruin of this gorilla and of the film as well.

Borges’ capsule review of KING KONG in which he mostly complains that Kong should be bigger

- and I have wondered sometimes if I’d reframed it - partly fictionalised it, then - as a tale of triumph in which my body & mind got fixed and everyone said sorry, got therapy and didn’t pass on more inter-generational trauma, that might have been considered more commercial. That really upsets me

It’s Sunday but I’m feeling all the feels so I’ve just pitched The Bookseller a piece centred on overcoming tropes. A few years ago a big 5 rejected a proposal from me; it was about mental health problems alongside physical disability. They didn’t want it on both because it would be too depressing

The real Salt Path: how the couple behind a bestseller le... Penniless and homeless, the Winns found fame and fortune with the story of their 630-mile walk to salvation. We can reveal it was far from the truth

If you've found yourself taking the narrative of the tragic illness the helpless homelessness and the walking cure encrusted with inspiration porn with a pinch of salt over the years, this is *quite* the read. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

There are no red states, no blue states, only purple, from Idaho fuchsia to Vermont violet. And in every state there are children, non-citizens, and prisoners who can't vote. In every state where one candidate won, a bunch of people voted for the other candidate. And so forth.

"The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."
- James Baldwin

A mandarine duck outside the house where I lived from 2020-2022 (which was a big inspiration for one of the locations in Villager).

Put on some nice clothes but then looked out the window and immediately felt like a man of slovenly appearance.

As a historian, I think of cities as the things that are real & permanent, not countries. Countries are like glaciers that move across & rearrange things, usually crawling slowly but sometimes cataclysmically fast when something triggers avalanche or flood; monument-boulders mark where they’ve been.

"Plant based potatoes" .... this is why aliens fly straight past us ASDA PLANT BASED MASHED POTATO

No doubt 👽

There were 31 church leaders & christian school employees who were arrested, pled guilty and/or were sentenced to prison for child sex crimes in the month of June.

Floofy dark brown Highland coo calf in a field of long green grass.

Did someone say Floof?

PETITION: Defend the right to protest: no proscription of Palestine Action

The government's plan to proscribe Palestine Action is part of a wider crackdown on protest. Instead of taking steps to prevent genocide, the gov wants to criminalise people demanding justice for Palestinians. Sign the petition to oppose this plan: palestinecampaign.eaction.org.uk/NoProscription

A Labour government is driving disabled people into poverty.

This is a scandal, a stain the party will never be able to wash itself of.

Every Labour MP who votes for this disgraceful legislation must be voted out and replaced by someone who stands up for the struggling.