About the event

Authors Katie Hale and Penny Jones explore the strength, danger and madness in a mother’s love.

Hale’s My Name is Monster centres on a young woman called Monster who believes she is alone in an empty, post-apocalyptic version of Britain. Subsequently, she begins to rebuild a life until, one day, she finds a child. Jones’ Suffer Little Children explores the amoral and often cruel side of developing children as well as the horrific anxiety that having children can bring.

Mother or Monster? We dare you to find out yourself.

Chaired by Tracy Fahey

About the speakers

Katie Hale’s debut novel, My Name is Monster, was published by Canongate in 2019. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Breaking the Surface (2017) and Assembly Instructions (2019), which won the Munster Fool for Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is a former MacDowell Fellow and Wordsworth Trust Poet in Residence. She regularly runs poetry workshops in schools.

Penny Jones currently lives in Devon with her long-suffering husband and patron of the arts Simon. Penny knew she was a writer when she started to talk about herself in the third person – her family apparently knew when she was little and Santa bought her a typewriter for Christmas (honestly who buys a three-year-old a typewriter?) She loves reading and will read pretty much anything you put in front of her, but her favourite authors are Stephen King, Shirley Jackson and John Wyndham. Her whole family are avid readers, meaning that they have had to move three times just to fit in their book collections. In fact, Penny only got into writing to buy books, when she realised that there wasn’t that much money in writing she stayed for the cake. Penny’s debut collection Suffer Little Children was published in 2019 by Black Shuck Books, and her first novel is currently doing the rounds of agents and publishers.

Find out more about Katie Hale and Penny Jones!