Thurs 16 May
7-9pm
This is an online event - you will be sent a link just before the event begins.
Join Pilot Press and Burley Fisher for the online launch of Candles and Water, the debut collection of prose by poet Timothy Thornton.
For the launch, Thornton will be joined by fellow writers Ellen Dillon, Huw Lemmey and Eley Williams, who will each read from their work, followed by a conversation with the author.
Candles and Water is a queer pillow book: a document of wreckage, haunting, and survival.
The collection is made of fictions and diaries, dreams and lists, lies and ghost stories. Its fragments and filaments are lonely, joyous, enraged, sickly, and lost. When they crystallize around a single voice, it is by way of healing from grief and recovery from addiction.
'Candles and Water risks everything, daring to explore powerful vulnerabilities, yearning, and unabashed hope. Elusiveness and the whisperings of shadows inhabit these pages, always illuminated and burnished by the voice of a poet'.
— Thomas Glave, author of Among The Bloodpeople
'Timothy Thornton's Candles and Water is a rare and transformational book, haunting, beautiful and watchful. Writing that follows its brush like Sei Shōnagon.'
— David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On
'These radical, scattered shards of life and sensation. . . come to a whole, coalescing like bioluminescence. . . witty, dark, profound, devastating. One long séance with a fellow human soul.'
— Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR
Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. His work was in Volume 2 of the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has published eleven books of poetry with small presses. He organised two series of reading and performance nights in Brighton: 'evenly and perversely' and 'WHAT YOU NEED'. He has composed and performed scores for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre.
Eley Williams’ short fiction appears in anthologies including The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Pilot Press’ Modern Queer Poets, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner. Her debut Attrib. And Other Stories won the James Tait Back Memorial Prize for fiction, with a second collection of short stories Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good forthcoming in 2024.
Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick, Ireland. Her latest books are Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel (HVTN Press, 2003) and tentatives (Pamenar Press, 2023). Previous books look at Irish history from the perspective of butter (Butter Intervention, Veer 2, 2022), the teaching life of Stéphane Mallarmé (Morsel May Sleep, Sublunary Editions, 2021), and Stephen Malkmus's guitar (Sonnets to Malkmus, Sad Press, 2019). She is currently working on a novel in prose poems called A Whale Called Milieu.
Huw Lemmey (b. 1986) is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of four books, including Bad Gays: A Homosexual History and Unknown Language, and his debut film, Ungentle, was released in 2022. He writes on sex, culture, history and cities for numerous magazines and journals including Frieze and Architectural Review. As an artist and filmmaker, his work has appeared at numerous international institutions and film festivals.