Holly Pester and Book Works are delighted to announce that Laura Elliott and Gro Pechüle have been selected to publish in the new open submission series called Satirical Strains, guest edited by Holly Pester. These two proposals were selected from a shortlist of eight. The selected works are:

so me killed me by Gro Pechüle

Gro Pechüle is a Copenhagen based artist. Her artistic practice is transdisciplinary, with poetry, music and images as common elements. She uses performative and conceptual approaches involving, among other things, the clarinet and her musical persona Grow Digga serves as a recurring enigma in her art.

Sitting somewhere between a long prose poem, a personal mythology and a collapsed diary, so me killed me follows the loss of an alter ego after an artists’ social media accounts are hacked and then erased. The book becomes a way to write through a disappearance we don’t yet have a language for.

Romance is Dead by Laura Elliott

Laura Elliott writes poetry, short stories, hybrid essays and works in libraries. Recent work can be found in the anthologies Fit Notes: Feminist Writing on Illness and Work (Ache) and Prototype 7. Her poetry has been published widely in magazines such as The White Review, Poetry Review, Poetry London, DATABLEED, Clinic, Zarf, Shearsman and more. Her pamphlets include this is hunting (Distance No Object, 2019), rib-boning (Moot Press, 2019) and lemon, egg, bread (Test Centre, 2017).

Romance is Dead explores the concept of romantic non-monogamy in, with and through the public library. It begins from the perspective of a librarian asked to remove the Mills & Boon collection from a public library in a London borough.

Shortlist: 

Ashley Barr – Wet Space: water-closet dramas
Cleo Henry – Glorious Holes
Emet Ezell – Wretched Heaven
Grace Denton
Hugo Hagger – Pleasures
Karen Whiteson – In the Direction of the Wound

For more information on winning and shortlisted artists and projects, read the full post on our website.

Book Works is dedicated to commissioning non-conforming works, offering a generative space for writing and writers that don’t fit into easily definable categories withing mainstream publishing. Our open call series is an annual commissioning platform, developed with guest editors who commissions new works exclusively drawn from open submission. Previous series include: New Writing Series (1995), guest edited by Michael Bracewell, which gave David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller their first publicly funded commissions; Semina (2008-2015), guest edited by Stewart Home, which commissioned nine new works including The Dark Object by Katrina Palmer; or Arrhythmia (2022-224), guest edited by Katrina Palmer that commissioned four books including The Wastes by Roy Claire Potter, The Medium by Alice Walter, Black Body Index by Andrew E. Colarusso, and Through the Tinnitus by Kamwangi Njue.

Our winter sale is still on until the end of the month – get up to 50% off the majority of titles across the website until midnight on 31 January!