‘[Roy Claire Potter is] the writer I get the most from, am so influenced by, relate to the most, am in awe of, am surprised by, find access and pleasure in writing because their work exists. Everyone read this… There’s so much done brilliantly here – food, class, home, mothers, work, sex.’ — Holly Pester, author of The Lodgers

‘Book of the year.’ — Nathalie Olah, author of Bad Taste

After the death of her mother a woman decides to visit a familiar strip of rural upland, darkly identified on the South Pennines Ordnance Survey map as: The Waste. As she moves between trains, shunted by public encounters and haunted by past bar jobs, damp bedsits and a press shot of Vanessa Redgrave smoking in the bath, found slipped between the pages of her mother’s diary, the threshold between her past, present and future self dissolves. Fringe images she has neither designed nor authored begin to steer her toward grid reference 3499, where underfoot the semi-solid mud turns with worms and ants. 

The Wastes is published as part of Arrhythmia, a series curated for Book Works by Katrina Palmer.

Roy Claire Potter works between performance and experimental art writing with recent work commissioned by Tate Britain and Tate Publishing, Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3, Cafe OTO and Counterflows, and Primary. They are Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University.

Katrina Palmer is an artist and writer, living in London. She is the author of The Dark Object (2010), The Fabricators Tale (2014), End Matter (2015) and Black Slit (2023), all published by Book Works. She has exhibited extensively, including with an Artangel Open commission (2015), at Henry Moore Institute (2015-16), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2018), and with Estuary and Waterfronts (2021). She received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2014).