We’ve had a fantastic response to our call for lockdown lit submissions and we’re delighted to publish our first selections.
In poetry, stories and prose poems, these pieces cover the range of lockdown experiences, from separation from loved ones in Julia Wood’s Sitting on my Husband, changes to home live in Sarah Dale’s Everyone is Home, to facing redundancy in Rachel Llewellyn’s Well…’Being’. Others address the plight of marginalised people in the pandemic, like the homeless person in Julia Wood’s A Plague of Kindness and the migrant worker in Elaine Graham-Leigh’s Ghosts. We’re not forgetting the famous people, though, as Richard Williams reflects on those who didn’t live to see this strange time in They Were Spared and Rajes Bala imagines what Boris Johnson must have been feeling in those days in hospital in A Cry out of Fear.
While we may have been locked down at home, our imaginations can roam as free as we like. The collection moves from the everyday to the fantastic with Susie Helme’s The Purple Mist, an even more deadly pandemic than this one, while Hywel Sedgwick-Jell’s lockdown baking unleashes a yeast monster in Sour. Finally, Oz Hardwick’s prose poems spin off from moments of the lockdown experience to reflect on life and death and everything in between.
We hope you’ll enjoy reading these pieces of lockdown lit as much as we have enjoyed selecting them. We’ll publish more selections as we get them, so do keep your submissions coming.
Bounds Green Book Writers 