Editorial Picks: Spring 2025
The Hinterland editorial team share some of their recent cultural recommendations.
Yin F Lim
It’s the time of the year when the Norfolk and Norwich Festival brings much energy and exuberance to Norwich. At this year’s opening weekend, the warm May sunshine was the perfect setting for outdoor performances at familiar locations around the city centre, which was filled with sounds, rhythms and movements inspired by Japan, India, Cambodia and the Caribbean as well as Afro-Cuban and Yoruba cultures.
The festival runs until the end of the Bank Holiday weekend, and my personal picks include Showdown, which combines circus stunts with humour and audience participation, and the TOAST Festival Speak Easy featuring poetry, spoken word, storytelling and performance. The City of Literature also kicks off this weekend, with Val McDermid delivering the Harriet Martineau Lecture on Saturday 24th May and the annual City of Literature Publishing Fair returning on Sunday (more below).
Further details about the festival events and ticket booking at: https://nnfestival.org.uk
Yin F. Lim is working on a family history project about her grandmother. She is an associate editor of Hinterland. Her article, ‘Tourist in my Homeland’, appears in Hinterland Issue 2.
Ben Kinsella
I’ve just read Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (which, rather conveniently, has just come out in paperback). It is an absolute masterclass in creative non-fiction, expertly weaving all kinds of genres and topics into one marvellous, meandering memoir that is so totally unique that it’s bound to be ripped off for decades to come.
If, like me, you’re wondering what on Earth you’re going to do for the next few months when the Premier League finishes and there’s no Euros and no World Cup, start by reading Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s memoir about football addiction. It’ll help you feel less alone.
I recently watched Grand Theft Hamlet: a documentary about two guys trying to stage a production of Hamlet in the online world of the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, it’s bonkers. And yes, it’s hilarious. But it’s also genuinely touching. I didn’t expect to be so moved.
Ben Kinsella is a writer/screenwriter from Norfolk. He has a BA in Film Studies and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Eight years after graduating, he is still working on his first book. He hopes to be done before it gets to ten. Ben is a reader for Hinterland.
Andrew Kenrick
There’s all sorts on my reading pile at the moment, as always, including the third part of Joe Abercrombie’s dark fantasy trilogy, The Last Argument of Kings. On the non-fiction front, Ben has just pushed his copy of Question 7 (see above) into my hands and I’ll get to that just as soon as I finish savouring Emmanuel Carrere’s The Kingdom, a sumptuous retelling of the life of St Paul, interwoven with the author’s own story of finding — and then losing — his faith.
Much like Yin, I’ve also been out and about in the city enjoying the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, and so far I’ve seen dance, theatre and performing arts in the sunshine, and am eagerly awaiting Seán Hewitt & Monique Roffey in conversation this coming weekend.
Also this weekend (Sunday, 10-4, Dragon Hall) is the annual City of Literature Publishing Fair, where you will find the Hinterland team alongside a vibrant selection of the region’s many small press publishers. Come say hi, quiz us about the craft of nonfiction and maybe pick up a back issue or two.
Andrew Kenrick is co-founder and co-editor of Hinterland. He holds a PhD in Life Writing from UEA. His first full-length book, a biography of the first-century North African king Juba II, is forthcoming.
Freya Dean
I’ve been reading Jenny McPhee's first unabridged English translation of Elsa Morante's Lies and Sorcery, which follows the lives of three generations of Sicilian women and through them creates a portrait of societal oppression and injustice. It's also about storytelling, and the power of narratives to invent — and misrepresent. Next on my fiction list is another work-in-translation: Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World, which I'm hoping to be as pleasingly unsettled by as her previous novels Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings. I'm also enjoying reading through recent submissions to Hinterland; and the pleasure as always of finding some real treasure in there.
Last week in London I visited Liberty to view their free exhibition ‘I am. We are. Liberty: A Journey Through The Liberty Archive’, which (though small in scale) is as beautiful a curation of Liberty's history as you'd expect from a fabric house at the top of their game for 150 years.
And, as someone who over-uses the increasingly under-used semicolon, I was intrigued by this article in The Guardian about semicolon usage, and pleased to find I scored 9 out of 10 on the linked quiz!
Freya Dean is a founding editor of Hinterland. She is a graduate of UEA’s Creative Writing MA where she received the Lorna Sage award. She is also an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation Finalist. Her work has featured in The Real Story, Visual Verse and UEA's Anthology series.