Portfolio

When You’re Smiling

When You’re Smiling is a tale about family, faith, and football. Set in Leicester against the run up to the Brexit referendum and the local football team’s bid for Premier League glory, it explores themes of identity, belonging, and what it takes to triumph over adversity.

In 2022, When You’re Smiling was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction by UK Black and Asian women.

I am seeking representation for When You’re Smiling – if you are an agent with an interest in witty, warm, and politically astute writing and a passion for amplifying lesser heard voices, contact me here.

Good Morning Filbert

Good Morning Filbert is an early version of the first chapter from my unpublished novel When You’re Smiling.

Good Morning Filbert is published in In The Middle, an anthology of writing from the Middle Way Mentoring Project, an Arts Council England funded programme on which I was very lucky to be a mentee from 2018 to 2020.

In The Middle contains contributions from the seven writers on the programme. It includes short stories, memoir, and fiction and is available from Dahlia Books.

Numbers

My short story Numbers was shortlisted for the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize in 2018.

Numbers tells the story of a woman uncovering secrets of her past as she talks to her dying mother in hospital.

Numbers is published in Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology 2018 from Dahlia Books.

Small World & Daddy

Small World and Daddy were published in the anthology for Coventry’s Positive Images Peace Festival Poetry Competition in 2018.

The theme of the competition was ‘Safe Places’, which I explored from the perspective of those for whom safety is compromised.

Small World describes my experiences as an overweight person struggling to navigate and find emotional safety in a fat-phobic world, while Daddy presents a scene of domestic violence as seen through the eyes of a child.

Both poems are available to read on the Positive Images Festival website.