The North Writes Back: Showcasing Bold New Fiction From Northern England

Posted on April 21, 2025 in North

In this SYP North Spotlight, we celebrate three powerful emerging voices from Northern England – Rozie Kelly, Mark Wright, and Lucy Rose – alongside the publishers bringing their work into the world. Each brings a unique lens to themes of identity, desire, trauma, and the power of place, offering captivating stories that show how regional storytelling is thriving far beyond London.

Despite the North’s wealth of literary talent, regional authors still face the challenge of navigating the London-centric literary landscape where visibility often hinges on proximity. But a change is stirring in the publishing scene. These authors, and the presses behind them, are helping to shift this narrative.

Spotlight: Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly, published by Saraband

Rozie Kelly’s Kingfisher is a darkly lyrical debut that explores the intersections of grief, power, beauty, and desire – and how these forces shape the relationships we build. Narrated by a creative writing academic, the novel follows his growing fixation with his colleague as he grapples with the emotional fallout of his fraught relationship with his semi-estranged mother.

Power imbalances run throughout the novel, particularly those shaped by age, gender, and institutional authority. The narrator’s interactions with his students, for instance, expose both a complex awareness of the power he holds and the troubling choices he makes within that space.

A maternal thread runs through Kingfisher too in its interrogation of how care can so easily warp into cruelty, and how fractured parent-child relationships can cause a lasting rupture in a person’s ability to connect with the world around them. Just as Kelly’s prose carries emotional precision, her sense of place is equally textured. The novel’s atmosphere is imbued with the Northern landscape – the mystique of the moors and the quiet of the woods – grounding the story in a world that is both intimate and untamed. Reflecting on her Northern writing roots, Kelly says:

“To me it seems that writers and publishers in the north are freer to take risks and be experimental in their work, which has certainly impacted my own bravery in doing so.”

Published by Saraband, an independent press championing Scottish and Northern literature, Kingfisher was the winner of their 2024 NorthBound Book Award – a prize celebrating outstanding literary talent from across the North.

Spotlight: Sublime Green Liniment by Mark Wright, published by Kulvert Books

In Sublime Green Liniment, Mark Wright conjures a world where the personal and the primaeval exist side-by-side. Rooted in Northern folklore, this vivid and mythic collection of poetry draws heavily from the landscape and collective cultural memory. Across each page, the poems carry a careful rhythm, oscillating between violence and tenderness, as well as ritual and rebellion. The North is not romanticised, but rather is reclaimed as a site of myth, resistance, and quiet transformation.

The collection’s strength lies in its ability to call upon the old ways and make them feel immediate and alive. Wright writes with a reverence for a history and landscape that never feels static:

“If I were to prescribe one thing for readers unfamiliar with the region to take from Sublime Green Liniment, it would be for them to be left with a very tangible sense of the oldness of this part of the country and the weight of the history which happened in this landscape we call home.”

Published by Kulvert Books, a new, independent Northern poetry press founded in 2024, Sublime Green Liniment embodies their vision of small-format collections that are portable, experimental, and hard-hitting.

Spotlight: The Lamb by Lucy Rose, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Set in contemporary Cumbria, The Lamb is a haunting, genre-bending debut that weaves together folklore, body-horror, and domestic drama. It follows Mama and her daughter Margot, living in an isolated cottage nestled in an ancient woodland. But Mama harbours a hunger – a hunger that can only be satisfied by the flesh of lost ‘strays’ who happen upon their secluded homestead.

Narrated by young Margot, the novel traces the dissonance between her mother’s care and cruelty. It’s a quiet, observational descent into the monstrous forms love can take. The Lamb meditates on what it means to be a mother when motherhood is unwanted, and the quiet loneliness of a child left to navigate that rejection. Here, Domestic innocence collides with predatory instinct as being nurtured and being consumed become disturbingly close in nature.

Since its release, The Lamb has seen huge success, becoming an instant Sunday Times bestseller and a pick for Dakota Johnson’s ‘Teatime Book Club’. Rose was also recently named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, further cementing her growing cultural presence.

The book’s eerie and evocative tone is matched by its stunning cover and atmospheric marketing. Its publication by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of Orion (Hatchette), signals that large publishers are backing bold, new fiction from the North.

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Regional independent publishers like Saraband and Kulvert Books are essential to sustaining a diverse and thriving literary ecosystem. They amplify authors who might otherwise be overlooked and ensure Northern voices reach both local and international readers. At the same time, the backing of The Lamb by a major imprint shows that bold, regionally rooted fiction can (and should) exist at every level of publishing.

These three authors, each with their distinct style, exemplify the richness and range of storytelling emerging from the North today. Their work speaks not just to regional identity, but to the universality of grief, desire, connection, and what it means to belong.

You can find Rozie Kelly’s and Mark Wright’s full responses in the extended version of this spotlight, available now on the SYP Resource Centre.

And if you’d like to hear more, Rozie Kelly will be joining us on the SYP North podcast in early May – so keep an eye out for that!

You can also check out our recent Indie Publisher Spotlight on Saraband here.

Written by Sophie Austen