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Interrogating the play’s magic and masculinity through a new focus on how stories are preserved and lost over time, this is historical literary fiction at its finest.

Sally O’Reilly grew up in Stoke-on-Trent and now lives in Sheffield. En route, she’s spent time in Brixton, Brighton and Barcelona. Her short stories have been published in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, and she has been shortlisted for the Cosmopolitan short story prize and the Ian St. James Awards. Her historical novel Dark Aemilia (Myriad Editions/Picardor US) was nominated for the Kirkus Prize. She has worked as a senior creative writing lecturer at the Open University, and her journalism has been published in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and New Scientist.

Sixteen years in, she moves between worlds with ease. She was once described as having “irreverent puckish vim” in a mag. She plays Barb in Shane Meadows’ The Gallows Pole, has opened for Pulp and John Cooper Clarke and performed for Chanel’s Metiers d’Art. She’s toured with Eliza Carthy for 18 months, and in 2025-6, took her songs to Aotearoa and Australia for four months to critical acclaim. She was awarded the Dennis Dubetz Award for her contributions to Cygnet Folk Festival in Tasmania in February 2026.

Told through a prism of vintage perfumes and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, her memoir Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.

Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.

Adelle Stripe was born in 1976 and grew up in Tadcaster. She is the author of Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, a fictionalised biography inspired by the life and work of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, Ten Thousand Apologies, a music biography mapping the chaotic rise and fall of one of the country’s most provocative rock ‘n’ roll bands, and most recently, Base Notes. Her books have been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, Portico Prize for Literature and Penderyn Music Book Prize. She was a 2023 Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester and is an editorial board member at British Pop Archive Books. She holds a PhD in Modern British History and Creative Writing and has lectured at MMU, Leeds Trinity and York St John. 

As Blackshirts march across the city, Rose is drawn to the fight against fascism, even as she’s compelled to face the devastating question – just which side is Renzo on?

Carolyn O’Brien was born in Manchester. She read English at Cambridge University before qualifying as a solicitor. Her historical fiction writing has a strong sense of the north-west of England and its radical past, as illustrated by her first novel The Song of Peterloo which was published to coincide with the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre. Her second novel Rose & Renzo is also set in Manchester and was selected as a historical fiction ‘Pick of the Month’ by the Sunday Times. Carolyn lives in south Manchester with her family

Norah Hodgkinson (1925-2009) was a working-class schoolgirl, later clerical worker, and a prolific diarist. In 1940, at the age of 14, she knitted a pair of socks for the Royal Navy Comforts Fund. The sailor who received them wrote to thank her, drawing Norah into a mysterious ‘love triangle’ and an experience that we would now call sexual grooming.

When Norah died in 2009, Alison Twells – her great niece and a professional historian – received a suitcase archive containing Norah’s 71 pocket diaries, a collection of photographs and the sailor’s letters. In A Place of Dreams, Alison explores the coming-of-age of an ordinary girl in wartime and uncovers a dark tale of male rivalry, wartime anonymity and a young woman’s appetite for life and love amidst unexpected dangers.