Philip Gross was born in Cornwall in 1952 and brought up in Plymouth; his father was an Estonian refugee, his mother a village schoolmaster’s daughter. He first became known as a poet in the early 1980s, at the time he moved to Bristol, and poetry and novels for young teenagers are now his core activities [...]

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Wrecking Ball Press (website slogan: ‘Strictly no flowers, just blunt hammered-home words’) is a Hull-based publisher subsidized by the Arts Council. Its founding editor has agonized about what a publisher should or should not inflict on the public: ‘What is good writing. What is bad writing.’ He is particularly fond of what he calls ‘WORDS’ [...]

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Shades of Grey by Bristol novelist Greg McGregor is the compelling love story of the relationship between Anne McCarthy, an innocent young English artist, and Jack Freedman, a worldly American black market art wheeler and dealer. Freedman is a lover of art and is well versed in the art of love. Anne is his pupil [...]

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Ed Trewavas has worked in South Bristol in a social work capacity for more than 30 years and has no doubt been confronted with the most horrendous cases in that time. But if he had taken photographs of the scenes he describes in Shawnie and posted them on the internet we would rightly be prosecuted [...]

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Nick Groom reveals new evidence which suggests that Thomas Chatterton did not commit suicide but died from an accidental overdose…
How did Bristol’s boy-poet and forger Thomas Chatterton die? The received wisdom is that he committed suicide out of despair at his poverty, out of bitterness at his failure to get published, and because he was [...]

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To hear Barrington Tabb described as ‘the L S Lowry of Bristol’ is to expect his paintings to be full of stick men and women scurrying around the city centre. So it’s quite a culture shock to come across his gorgeously coloured, thickly impastoed scenes of city life more reminiscent of Utrillo and Soutine. What [...]

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Michael Pascoe charts the career of the novelist who described Clifton life between the wars.
If the straitlaced matrons of Clifton between the two world wars had known the secret private life of their favourite author, E H Young, it is quite possible that they would not have read her novels – at least not in [...]

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