Wanstead journalist and poet Victoria Richards has just published her first collection of short stories. It’s typically edgy and – like many things Victoria writes about – involves Wanstead.
“Sylvia Plath watches us sleep, but we don’t mind is the result of a couple of years of early child-rearing, during which I took to ‘haunting’ my own windows at home in the middle of the night, in those ‘witching hour’ moments when it feels like nobody else in the world is awake,” she told Wansteadium.
“I found I had so many tumbling thoughts and ideas, words that wouldn’t wait – half-sketched stories and poems which bled through the ‘notes’ section of my iPhone and then swiftly developed a life of their own on the page.”
By day Victoria runs the Independent’s Voices section. By night she unleashes her creativity – as people who have attended the Spoken Word evenings as part of the Wanstead Fringe will attest. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize, was highly commended in the Bridport Prize and was long listed in the Bath Short Story Award 2017.
The blurb of the book reads:
A Jewish woman has been having ‘unnatural thoughts’ about the softness of another woman’s skin. A feminist arranges to meet her online troll. A woman worries, under her duvet, whether she should sit content in a marriage that has turned comfortable…that is, until she falls in love with a tree…
The tree, in case you’re wondering, is in Wanstead Park.
There are some copies of Victoria’s book on the Wanstead Bookshop bookcase in City Place Coffee, or you can order it here.
