The Weirdness of Place

Three exceptional writers explore the cities, the towns, the rural and wild places that overwhelm their storytelling. Fifty years ago, writer, poet and filmmaker Iain Sinclair published the cult classic Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets, igniting psychogeography in British writing as it created a visionary map of East London’s lost energies. The dilapidated seaside town of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new Saltwash follows the unsettling countrysides and coasts of his The Loney and Starve Acre. Landscape and its effect on people, is at the heart of Sarah Hall’s novels and stories and in her latest novel Helm, a Cumbrian wind is even the central character.