 I present to you my Next Big Thing tagees. Get a peek into two books in the making, and one that is already out there, ready for reading. This gorgeous cover to the left is Rosie Garland's upcoming novel The Palace of Curiosities. Rosie has been well-known and well-loved for a long time now as both a singer and itinerant vampire poet, and as well as publishing her poetry under both her vamp and mortal identities (I particularly recommend recent poetry collection Everything Must Go) , she is now going all long-form and read-in-the-bath on us as a novelist - yes! Check out her answers to The Next Big Thing on her blog. Next we have Martin De Mello who does an excellent line in perceptive and sharply written weirdness. He's one of those folk who spends more time promoting the work of other writers than he does his own, which is great for Manchester writers, but means that his published work so far is criminally underexposed. (Get your mitts on his poetry chapbook if our love stays above the waist from flipped eye.) Let the expose begin: next up is a collection of short stories that circle around the importance of being unimportant; read more here in his first and very much coerced blog entry.  Maya Chowdhry is an artist who won't stay inside the lines. She began with scriptwriting, then poetry and short fiction, and now also works digitally with writing, moving and still images, and website design. For the launch of her poetry collection The Seamstress and the Global Garment, she held a swap shop as part of the reading. Her audience became a moving mass of 'do you really want to trade this?' and 'that is definitely your colour.' It was poetry and practical politics. I came away with a book of poems that took me to distant continents, and a pair of boots that still keep out the rain. Read about the book in her Next Big Thing post...and hey, check out the poetry section of Waterstones next time you're in and grab a copy! There are two more tagged writers still hiding in the digital shadows. We shall hear from them soon. Comments are closed.
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