We’re delighted to be welcoming Abi Hynes to the shop for the launch of her debut collection MONSTROUS LONGING. Exploring themes of desire, womanhood, and obsession, these short stories are sometimes funny, sometimes uncanny, but never too far from the truth. Abi will be in conversation with Tania Hershman.

Doors: 18.30, event starts: 18.45

Tickets are £3.00 or free when pre-ordering a copy of the book. MONSTROUS LONGINGS will also be available to purchase on the night and Abi will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.

About the book:

Abi Hynes’ Monstrous Longing is a collection of feminist speculative and contemporary short stories that explore the themes of love, hunger, and obsession. They are poignant, sometimes frightening, sometimes funny tales of human relationships and desires that view the world at a slant, or take the reader to worlds that are not quite like our own.

About the author:

Abi Hynes is an award-winning drama and fiction writer based in Manchester. Her short stories have been published widely in print and online, including in Black Static and Interzone, and in short fiction anthologies from Boudicca Press, Fairlight Books and Splice. She won the Cambridge Short Story Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction ‘Novella in Flash’ Award in 2017. Her plays have been performed across the UK, and she has written four episodes of historical audio drama DARK HARBOUR. She also writes for TV, and her script LONG LOST was on the Brit List in 2022.

A queer writer of odd things, Tania Hershman lives in Manchester and is the author of three short story collections, two poetry collections, two poetry pamphlets and has just reflease her first novel Go On (Broken Sleep Books). Tania’s second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published in July 2022 by Nine Arches Press. Co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers and Artists Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014), she is co-founder of the On This Day She Twitter account and co author of On This Day She: Putting Women Back Into History One Day At A Time (John Blake, 2021). Tania has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics.