Happy birthday to Hinterland
Celebrating 5 years and 15 issues with a memoir & life writing special
Back in May we passed the fifth anniversary of Hinterland’s first issue. Between you and me, we weren’t sure we’d make it to our first anniversary, let alone our fifth, so untested were the waters in the UK for a magazine dedicated solely to creative nonfiction. Luckily, we found out there was an appetite not just amongst readers but also writers.
The latter is an understatement; whenever we open our submissions window1 our inbox is near-overwhelmed by wonderful, eclectic, unexpected writing - no bad problem to have, we like to think.
By far the most frequently submitted genre is memoir and life writing — around ninety percent of all the submissions we receive. Again, this is mirrored by the appetite of our readers — the last time we devoted a whole issue to life writing2 , it quickly became one of our bestsellers. So, we decided to turn the pages of our latest issue over to this favourite of genres, featuring some truly exceptional authors writing on a range of subjects.
By far the most frequently submitted genre is memoir and life writing — around ninety percent of all the submissions we receive
In ‘Clips’, Jay Prosser uses an everyday object to tell a sweeping autobiographical story, while James Roderick Burns weaves a dual narrative in ‘Dry Stone’ about another seemingly mundane structure. In ‘Not Everything is Broken’ Rose Kemsley writes movingly about the death of her young fiance by also focusing on artefacts; those that heartbreakingly remind her of his life.
In ‘Something or Nothing’ Sarah Davies considers a life spent in the grip of health anxiety and Lottie O’Conor tells a tale of an earlier life working in a strip club in ‘Changing Rooms’, whilst Julia Martinčič ponders on her love story with English language and culture in ‘Great Brit! A Eulogy.’
Elsewhere two authors write about lives on paper; in ‘Mary Ann, Sadie and Me’ Sarah Clement discusses the use of various personas in writing about the difficult moments in one’s own life, while Electra Rhodes’ ‘Doing Bird’ tells a tale of letters exchanged with a prisoner on death row.
In ‘The Father, The Son’, Rob McClure Smith writes gut-punchingly about the relationship between fathers and sons, a theme also explored in very different ways by Mark Foss and Ashley Barker in our regular features — ‘Ekphrasis’ and ‘Brief Lives’.
The focus on the personal carries through our flash and non-fiction pieces from Sheena Graham-George, Sarah Passingham and Kareem Tayyar, rounding out what we hope will be another best-selling issue!
Issue 15 is available to preorder over at our webstore now, and will be heading out to magazine subscribers and preorder customers in the next couple of days.
Which we plan on doing again in the next few days — keep an eye on our social media and our Submittable page, or here on Substack of course.
Issue 7, back in 2021, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood.