Events

Thursday evening at Beveridge Hall felt electric. Amia Srinivasan’s “The Impossible Patient” wasn’t just another academic lecture—it was intellectual archaeology of our current political moment. Srinivasan approached the podium with that quiet confidence you recognize in serious thinkers. Her premise? Political theorists are turning back to Freud not for nostalgia, but for tools. Repression, fantasy, […]

Monday night at Shoreditch House with Lucy Foley reminded me why I rarely attend book club events. Most writer conversations feel rehearsed. This one didn’t. ELLE COLLECTIVE organized the evening and brought the right crowd. Foley talked about The Midnight Feast the way I think about Project Mirror. She pitched her book as “Soho Farmhouse

Thursday evening at Fulham Library. I’d structured the discussion around a question that’s been bothering me whilst writing Project Mirror: do we ever stop performing, even when alone? The answer came through extended silences that revealed more than any prepared response could have. I’d prepared questions about digital self-presentation, algorithmic beauty, the performance of authenticity.

Try this: Picture yourself completely alone. No cameras, no one watching. What are you wearing in that image? How are you standing? You’re still performing. Even in your own head, you can’t access an unperformed version of yourself. I’m writing Project Mirror, a novel where people’s faces get software updates. Neural implants adjust bone structure

Last night’s event at The London Library reminded me why I write about performance and authenticity. Hallie Rubenhold and Kate Summerscale discussed how misogyny and media sensationalism shaped two infamous British murder cases, and the parallels to our current moment felt unsettling. Rubenhold’s work on Dr Crippen reframes the story through Belle Elmore’s perspective, moving

The faces that filled Regnum Carya’s lobby last night were young enough to have grown up with beauty filters as default reality. Perfect audience for dismantling our algorithmic beauty future. The conversation started predictably with questions about character development, research process, typical book discussion territory. Then someone asked if I thought beauty subscriptions would actually

The lobby of Regnum Carya becomes literary territory on August 26th. I’ll be talking about Project Mirror, the book that’s been consuming my thoughts since July. If you’ve been following the blog posts, you know this story emerged from my nail salon chair six weeks ago. A client asked for ‘influencer hands’ through surgery, not

I just finished a residency through Literature Across Frontiers on the Culture Reset platform. Task: produce reflective essay on literary exchange, collaborate with peers on short translations. Wrote the essay in English. Prepared dedicated Russian version, not translation, adaptation. Different rhetorical traditions, different assumptions about what “literary exchange” means. The Russian version had to argue