Ruby Cowling book launch at Bolton Library

She’s been garnering awards and has been showered with praise by some of our faves – Jon McGregor, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams (who says: “Cowling’s wonderful This Paradise is a celebration of all that short stories can be, might be, and should be”), to name three – and now short story writer Ruby Cowling is launching her debut collection, This Paradise, out this March with exciting new UEA-based publisher Boiler House Press.

Ruby’s work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Forge, Lighthouse, The Letters Page, The Lonely Crowd and Unthology, and the collection includes the story Biophile, which won The White Review Short Story Prize 2014, and Flamingo Land, which won the London Short Story Prize 2014.

Ruby Cowling has been described as “a writer of enormous promise” by exciting new UEA-based publisher Boiler House Press, who call This Paradise “a delicious, bold and often frightening collection”

Bradford born, Ruby now lives in London, where she’s busy working on a third book (there’s a novel on its way too), but she’s back up North for this event at Bolton Library in the rather grand Le Mans Crescent (check out the newly opened Egyptology displays while you’re there, if you have time). As well as reading from This Paradise, she’ll be chatting to fellow writer, lecturer in creative writing at the University of Bolton and Senior Editor at The Forge literary magazine Valerie O’Riordan. Winner of the Bristol Prize and a graduate of the MA and PhD programmes at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing, you can also catch Valerie on 21 March at the brand-new Blackwell’s in Manchester, chairing a debut author event featuring Glen James Brown, Amy Arnold and SK Perry. More here.

Back to Ruby, though, and she has been described as “a writer of enormous promise” by Boiler House, who call This Paradise “a delicious, bold and often frightening collection”. The press release gives us a taster: “Written with an arresting eye for detail, a rich sense of compassion and a darkly comic understanding of the human psyche, the stories in this volume propose a series of haphazard questions, not least of which is: where do we run to when there’s nowhere left to run?”