As we reach the end of 2019 I wanted to bring all the different things I have been up to over the past twelve months into one place. It has been a busy, exciting and exhausting year, not least because it saw the publication of my debut novel BUILT ON SAND (Influx Press) as well as a number of other short stories and essays that have found their way out into the world:

For the New Statesman (essay): ‘How Joseph Roth saw Europe’s future’.
For Lit Hub (essay): ‘How Berlin Reckons with Its Past Each and Every Day’.
For SAND Journal (short story & interview): ‘Trans Europa Express’.
For hidden europe (essay): ‘A Walk in Grumsin: The Forest and the German Imagination’.
For BLA Bokvennen Litteraer Avis (essay): ‘Against forgetting’.
For The Lonely Crowd (short story): ‘The Haunted Land’.
For Caught by the River (essays): ‘Field Notes from High Fläming’ and ‘Shadows & Reflections’.

We also continued with Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, which is now an online journal and for which I wrote the following articles and essays:
‘On Potsdamer Straße (to see an old friend)’.
‘Postcard from Rüdenhof, Moritzburg’.
‘Between the villages’.

As the editor in chief of Elsewhere, I also previewed the fine album ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ by Will Burns & Hannah Peel, and had the privilege to edit and publish far more fine writing than I have space for here. One particularly proud moment was to publish a series of literary tributes to writers at risk around the world, in collaboration with English PEN – archive here.

Earlier in the year I was interviewed by Nothing But The Rulebook about my writing, while in November, I was interviewed for the Monocle podcast ‘The Urbanist’ about borders, memory and the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were also readings in Germany, the UK and Ireland, all of which were a lot of fun and are listed here.

The end of the year also saw the first time my work has appeared in German. Ulrike Kretschmer translated my essay about a night walk in Berlin for the anthology PSYCHOGEOGRAFIE, edited by Anneke Lubkowitz and published by Matthes & Seitz.

So that was my 2019 in writing. Let’s see what 2020 brings…