This provocative cornucopia of fiction and non-fiction reminds us why we read. Exploring the complexities of the human condition, UEA’s 2024 Prose Fiction MA graduates make fresh and astonishing territory of the everyday, be it the back of a truck or the inside of a cocoon. Roaming present-day Sri Lanka, Nigeria, East Anglia, 1900s New York and AI futures, these perceptive narratives offer bold, urgent and often daring insights into what it means to be alive today. The submissions of the Biography and Creative Non-Fiction MA cohort are equally electrifying. From family history, memoir and psychogeography to historical investigations, essays and non-fiction novels, the eighteen non-fiction pieces in this collection pulsate with emotion, intrigue and mind-bending narratives. With forewords by Priscilla Morris and Miranda France, and introductions by Julianne Pachico and Ian Thomson, this anthology showcases some of the finest writing talent emerging today.

Miranda France is the prize-winning author of five books, encompassing memoir, fiction, non-fiction and reportage, as well as a translator from Spanish and a consultant editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Priscilla Morris is a fiction writer, whose debut novel Black Butterflies is set in the 1990s during the siege of Sarajevo. She grew up in London and read Spanish, Italian and Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. After teaching English in Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro, she did an MA followed by a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She now lectures in Creative Writing at University College Dublin and lives between Ireland and Catalonia. Ian Thomson is an award-winning biographer, travel writer, translator and literary critic known for his interest in Italy, the West Indies and the Baltic. Julianne Pachico was born in 1985 in Cambridge, England and grew up in Cali, Colombia. Her short stories have been published in New Yorker, Granta and the White Review, and she teaches creative writing at UEA.