Garden Among Fires, A Lockdown Anthology

(ebook from Dodo Ink Press)

Read an abridgment of the Introduction as it appeared in ‘Reading the Lockdown Diaries’ –  Prospect Magazine

In March 2020, as we entered the first lockdown, I set up a pop-up blog called ‘Garden Among Fires’, and invited writers from all over the world to offer diarised snapshots of their daily lives. The form in which they submitted these was up to them – poems, letters, reflections, provocations. I’d post two to three entries a week and then take down the blog when lockdown ended. The idea was that the blog might be a kind of collective space, a refuge from the then largely unknown peril outside: a place to create a real-time chronicle of life under lockdown, and to uncover the hopes, fears, unexpected comforts and deep paranoias many of us harboured during that time.

The book brings together work from 40-plus writers, including poems from Rishi Dastidar, Noga Arikha, Amlanyjyoti Gowsami, Reshma Ruia; ‘Letters’ from Berlin, Dinan, Piedmont, Gothenberg, Sofia, Edinburgh and Melbourne; and prose contributions from a wonderful group of writers including: Julia Bell, Lily Dunn, Samantha Ellis, Susanna Crossman, Amy Liptrot, Rebecca Abrams, Joanne Limburg, Caroline Eden, Tania Hershman, Katherine May, Sam Mills and Monique Roffey.