Non-fiction – essays, memoir and other outbursts
My Life In Print – the joy of early 80s comics and teen mags
CarBootLand – bric a brac preparations for apocalypse. First broadcast on the Writers Aloud podcast 2021. Listen to the original here.
Library Sketches – Sutton Coldfield (2019)
A Cupboard Of My Own – memoir of toy incarceration commissioned by the New York Times (2013)
Take Me High – essay exploring Cliff Richard’s bizarre cinematic love song to Birmingham. Commissioned by Flatpack Festival in 2017
How I Write – writer’s block, me and the Overlook Hotel (short piece for RLF Vox Podcast 2019)
The Writing Life – deceiving my stupid boss (short piece for RLF Vox Podcast 2019)
Place and the Writer – Merry Hill Shopping Centre – my greatest muse – first broadcast on the Writers Aloud podcast (2018)
Sweeping the Floor – procrastination, cleaning and the empty page (first published in 2019 in the Royal Literary Fund’s Collected)
Fine Dining – my love of cheap, chain restaurants. Originally a talk delivered at the sixth Boring Conference (2015)
Utopias – my lifelong fascination with failed utopias – first broadcast on the Writers Aloud podcast (2018)
Library Tickets – melancholia about the loss of my childhood library (first published in 2016 in the Royal Literary Fund’s Collected)
A visit to Hack Green nuclear bunker – transcript of talk given at The Event organised by Leila Johnson (2012)
Mr Lynch and his holiday – a short essay on the origins of the novel
The Flawed Cartographer – my imperfect grasp of the world around me. First appeared Granta 103 The Rise of the British Jihad (2008)
The Navigator – commission on the dark side of sat-nav from BBC Radio 3’s The Verb (2011)
Lost in Floorspace – a piece for The Independent newspaper on the opening of the Westfield Stratford City Shopping Centre in 2011
Made in England – an Arts Council commission about rodents and Birmingham
Why Contribute to the Spread of Ugliness? – thoughts on archives, unloved buildings and John Madin. Written to accompany Stuart Whipps exhibition catalogue of the same title (2011)
My Week – an action packed and thrilling account of a week in my life written for The Observer
Trading Places – alternative retail experiences
Book Reviews
10:04 by Ben Lerner – review for The Guardian 2015
Tender by Belinda McKeon – review for The Guardian 2015
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin – review for The Guardian 2015
A whole load more book reviews I’ve done can be listened to on the Brum Radio Book Club podcast archive. Tune in each month for more book based piffle.
Fiction – short stories and extracts
You’ve Got Everything Now – loosely inspired by the song of the same name. Originally published in Please: fiction inspired by The Smiths ed. Peter Wild 2009
Daytripper – a short story written in collaboration with a reading group. Commissioned by West Midlands Readers’ Network in 2014
Heathlands – short story for children commissioned by General Public as part of their Heathland Festival 2018
Project Champion – suspect communities in the city for the Writers at Liberty series
The Periscope – a boy and his Uncle Remus playkit
The Dawn Chorus – thinly disguised memoirs of a former postal delivery worker
Blossom Time – the first, embryonic traces of Dermot the bus driver, who went on to become Mr Lynch