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brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Broken Sleep Books
@brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
5.3K followers 2.9K following 380 posts
Award winning indie publisher | Poetry | Essays | Fiction | Lay out your unrest | Widening access to the arts | Editor: @godzillakent.bsky.social | For reviews: [email protected] | Founded: 2018

Website: brokensleepbooks.com
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brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Liza Costello is a writer to watch.
— Irish Times

A truly gifted writer.
— Andrew Rosenheim

Shot through with a wry humour that edges towards the savage.
— Christina Patterson

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November 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Unfolding with a cinematic sense of rhythm and control, this is fiction that unsettles gently but decisively, refusing neat resolution in favour of truth’s more fragmented shapes.

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November 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Costello renders each interior crisis, postpartum psychosis, betrayal, estrangement, grief, with stark clarity and devastating calm, allowing meaning to accrue in gesture, omission and atmosphere.

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November 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Traversing psychiatric institutions, troubled relationships, sunlit piazzas and Guatemalan backroads, the narratives centre voices negotiating memory, trauma and desire in language that is spare yet quietly propulsive.

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November 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
None of Us Will Be Okay by Liza Costello is a taut, emotionally layered collection of interconnected stories exploring dislocation, intimacy and rupture across personal and political terrains.

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A soft watercolour wash in terracotta and sky-blue hues depicts the skyline of Florence, with the dome of the Duomo and Palazzo Vecchio tower prominently featured. The title None of Us Will Be Okay appears in a deep rust-red serif at the top, with Liza Costello’s name in a matching but lighter shade. The publisher's name, Broken Sleep Books, is subtly placed at the bottom in black.
November 26, 2025 at 1:44 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Set against the salt-bright textures of water and sand, the work stages a quiet, radical reclamation of identity, intimacy and myth, yielding a poetics that is both elemental and deeply personal.

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November 26, 2025 at 1:37 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Hale's language is fluid and precise, attuned to the tensions of embodiment and the lyric potential of refusal.

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November 26, 2025 at 1:37 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Braiding poetic narrative, essay and mythic retelling, the sequence reimagines the selkie as a figure of in-betweenness, a creature of thresholds, shaped by longing, breath, and change.

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November 26, 2025 at 1:37 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Slipped Skin by Katie Hale is a tender, sensuous meditation on queerness, transformation, and the porous boundaries between land and sea, body and story. @katiescribbles.bsky.social

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A cream-coloured cover with the title Slipped Skin in warm orange and the author’s name, Katie Hale, in soft blue. Scattered across the centre are delicate, watercolour illustrations of various sea shells—oyster, clam, mussel, razor, and scallop—rendered in pastel tones. “Broken Sleep Books” appears subtly at the bottom in pale olive serif font.
November 26, 2025 at 1:37 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
We didn’t get Books Council Wales funding, it would've meant 5 years of stability. It’s a blow, and it means a rockier road ahead, but our commitment to ambitious, inclusive, working-class publishing stays firm. If you want to help: buy a book, spread the word, or donate:

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Dear friends, I’m writing with some difficult news. We recently applied for long-term revenue funding through the Books Council of Wales, support that would have secured stability for Broken Sleep Books for the next five years and helped us continue publishing the ambitious, risk-taking, inclusive work we believe in so deeply. Unfortunately, we were not successful. It’s disappointing, of course. We put forward a strong application, had a positive interview, and genuinely believed our publishing programme where we champion low socio-economic status authors, working-class authors, and marginalised authors, while widening access to the arts and degentrifying the arts, reflected the cultural values Wales should be proud to support. Clearly, our idea of cultural value doesn’t fully match the Books Council’s. Sometimes decisions go another way. What hasn’t changed is our commitment. Broken Sleep Books will carry on publishing with the same determination, ambition, and care that has always sustained us, just with fewer resources and a much harder road ahead. If you value what we do, there are meaningful ways you can help us weather this moment: 📚 Buy a book, or a few Every purchase directly supports the press. Browse the catalogue here: https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/books 🎁 Consider our books as gifts With the holidays approaching, this makes a real difference. 💬 Spread the word Tell a friend, share our books online, recommend us to a bookshop, or forward this newsletter. ❤️ Make a donation (if you’re able) Some readers have asked how they can help directly. If you’d like to support our work with a small donation, we’ve set up a simple option here: https://ko-fi.com/brokensleepbooks (Please only give if you’re in a position to do so, we know times are hard for many.) Broken Sleep has always been a community effort, powered by readers, writers, booksellers, and supporters who believe in literature that takes risks and makes space for voices that don’t always find a home elsewhere. Thank you, sincerely, for sticking with us. Your support means everything, especially right now.
November 20, 2025 at 4:18 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Authors include Will Alexander, Scout Tzofiya Bolton, Geoff Hattersley, Martin Hayes, Rishi Dastidar, Rhian Elizabeth, Aaron Kent, Shane McCrae, Rushika Wick, Richard Skinner, Maria Sledmere, Stuart McPherson, Daragh Fleming, and more!

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November 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
It offers a sharp snapshot of contemporary literature while reflecting a working-class ethos & a commitment to degentrification, community power & accessible culture. A vibrant, dynamic & award-winning independent press distilled into one compelling volume.

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November 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
The Broken Sleep Books Anthology 2025 gathers standout, risk-taking writing from every publication of the year, spanning poetry, non-fiction and fiction.

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Minimal dark teal cover with clean white typography; large title “Broken Sleep Books 2025” at the top left; a smaller line reads “Edited by: Aaron Kent & Stuart McPherson”; publisher credit “Broken Sleep Books” sits subtly at the bottom left.
November 6, 2025 at 10:18 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
These poems probe and worry syntax into a frank and absorbing poetic
— Jack Underwood

Jake Wild Hall’s voice has a clarity that will break you
— Clare Pollard

painful and beautiful to read
— Caroline Bird

A welcomed return from Jake Wild Hall.
— Yomi Ṣode

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November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Hall balances absurdism and sincerity with remarkable control, moving between domestic & digital, sacred & profane. What emerges is a lyric mode that is generous, self-questioning, and defiantly alive to the emotional contradictions of contemporary manhood.

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November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
The poems resist singular narrative arcs, instead offering refrains, fragments, and abrupt tonal pivots that echo the dislocation of memory and the loops of online life.

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November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Alanis Morissette by Jake Wild Hall is a sprawling, tender, and formally inventive collection that weaves fatherhood, friendship, grief, and masculinity into a shifting, polyphonic tapestry.

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Sky-blue, textured background scattered with colourful confetti (purple, yellow, white, green); a pale blue title band at the top left reads “Alanis Morissette” in bold black with “Jake Wild Hall” beneath in purple; “Broken Sleep Books” appears small in green at the bottom left.
November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Lose yourself in it and retrace the steps you never took, this is a poem that understands that any convulsion of desire is part of a greater game of absence.
— David Spittle

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October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
The book is both critique and enactment of representation: a work pursued by its maker, stalked by its forms, and shadowed by Christine. Elle is a hauntological lyric, a summoning that won’t let the archive lie still.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Blending procedural method with pulp volatility, Sheppard mines and retools the idioms of violence, sex, media, and myth, threading the ghosts of Buñuel, Jeff Keen, and the tabloid unconscious into a shattered, many-voiced delirium.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Elle: A Verse Novel by Robert Sheppard is a fierce, densely layered détournement, refashioning Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour through splices, warpings, and an unnerving overlay of 1960s Brighton scandal onto a surrealist template.

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Minimal white cover with a thin mustard outer frame and double pink inner border; centred grey author name “Robert Sheppard” at the top; large magenta title “ELLE: A VERSE NOVEL” below; a sketched black circle sits mid-page; “Broken Sleep Books” appears centred at the bottom.
October 31, 2025 at 2:13 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
From start to finish, language in Divided Tongues is used as a tool of egress: brought down like a whip, drawn through us like a saw, or saved for a final spear-thrust to the side.
— Kirsten Irving

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Davidson Roberts’ gift is for letting a story tell itself, while a clarifying music emerges to redeem or illuminate the journey.
— Sean O’Brien

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
With motifs of exile, fractured lineage, & cultural inheritance, Roberts interrogates the weight of language as burden & possibility. The result is a poetic landscape where borders, geographic, linguistic, emotional, are repeatedly crossed & contested.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM
brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
Drawing on scriptural echoes, historical figures, and contemporary disaffection, the poems assemble a polyphonic lyric that shifts between reportage, lament, and surreal invocation.

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October 31, 2025 at 2:05 PM