It’s been a busy month at The Lonely Crowd with the announcement of Issue Five, our largest anthology to date, alongside the news that our publishing wing will release its first full length books in spring, 2017: The Beautiful Rooms by Valerie Sirr and Ergasy by Chris Cornwell.

Valerie Sirr

Of the two books, Editor John Lavin said: ‘I’m delighted to tell you that The Lonely Press will publish two new titles in the spring of 2017. The first is quite simply a classic short story collection – The Beautiful Rooms by Valerie Sirr. When we first started last year, we set out to be the ‘New Home of the Short Story’ and I can hardly believe our luck that we are able to publish the debut collection of such a talented, award-winning short story writer as our first book. The collection is psychologically complex, emotionally uncompromising and expertly crafted, as Valerie’s startling story ‘Made You Look’, illustrated so succinctly in our recent spring issue. I really do think that it is the perfect first short story collection for The Lonely Press to publish.

‘The other book we are publishing is a debut collection of poetry entitled Ergasy by Swansea MA student Chris Cornwell, a poet that we’ve published three times now in the Crowd – including two entirely scintillating poems in this current issue. Poetry has grown to be as integral to The Lonely Crowd as short fiction, and I believe that Chris is exactly the type of new young writer that we should be championing. I feel like it is probably the most ambitious debut poetry collection that I’ve read in a decade.’

Issue Five of The Lonely Crowd

Meanwhile the new issue of The Lonely Crowd is now available to pre-order here. At 318 pages in length it is by far our largest anthology to date and one that is packed with work of scintillating quality and ambition from an array of acclaimed authors. The full list of contributors is as follows: Rachel Trezise. Gerald Dawe. Eimear Ryan. Uschi Gatward. Theophilus Kwek. Órfhlaith Foyle. John Freeman. Matthew David Scott. Susan Maiermoul. Katherine Duffy. Carla Manfredino. Hugh Fulham-McQuillan. Chris Cornwell. Craig Austin. Alix Nathan. Daniel Wade. Richard W. Strachan. Nick Black. Jo Mazelis. Jon Elcock. Ruth McKee. Jay Merill. Fred Johnston. Jonathan Taylor. Gary Raymond. Glyn Edwards. Jamie Guiney. Richard Redman. Sophie McKeand. Ian Steadman. Françoise Harvey. Tony Curtis. Rebecca Lawn. Kathy Groan.  It also contains an in-depth interview with Editor John Lavin by the prizewinning author, Susan Maiermoul.