It’s always a particular pleasure to host young, newly-published writers. Lottie Mills will talk to us about her outstanding debut collection Monstrum (2024). Lottie studied English at Cambridge, and won the BBC Young Writers’ Award (2020) for ‘The Changeling’. She has written for British Vogue, BBC Radio 4, and BBC Radio 1, and discussed her work on Woman’s Hour and Front Row. Monstrum was published in May 2024, a ‘Best Book for May’ in both Cosmopolitan and Glamour. The stories are disturbingly dark tales with a fabulous otherworldly quality, incorporating gothic and folk-horror elements. They may remind you of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, Shirley Jackson’s haunting horror and Angela Carter’s re-imagined fairytales. A. S. Byatt called Lottie’s work ‘a superb flight of the imagination’. 

Photo: Jojo Barlow