Ashley Hickson-Lovence & Luke Kennard

Two of British fiction’s most inventive writers, both poets first, talk about their latest fictions. Expect a sharp, funny, unguarded conversation about men, art, and the stories we tell to make sense of ourselves and what’s left of us when the performance stops. 

In Booker Prize 2026 longlisted Kennard’s Black Bag, an out-of-work actor takes a job sitting silently inside a bag at the back of a university lecture hall, a real 1967 psychology experiment reimagined as a study of masculinity. In Hickson-Lovence’s About to Fall Apart, a sixty-six-year-old man tries to stay positive as his life turns on a single long weekend.

‘A dynamic voice.’
Irenosen Okojie on Ashley Hickson-Lovence 

‘With all the fuss about the manosphere, Luke Kennard’s Black Bag comes as comic relief.’
The Standard