Launch: The Hidden Gem Press
Last Thursday, another new independent publishing house was welcomed onto the burgeoning Manchester scene. It was standing room only at The Hidden Gem Press launch, with well over 100 writers, readers, editors, artists and musicians rocking up to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, a fairly new kid on the block itself. Even more impressive was the support shown from fellow independent presses; Nicholas Royle, for example, was on hand to represent Nightjar Press (and shift a few chapbooks), as were short fiction champions Comma Press, including founder and managing editor Ra Page.
Comma writer Zoe Lambert was, in fact, one of the “support acts” of the evening. The lecturer in creative writing at University of Bolton read us Down Duchy Road; the tragic Salford-based tale of a soldier’s ex-wife who is drawn to religion to help her forget a life torn by alcohol and domestic violence. It features in Zoe’s upcoming short story collection The War Tour.
Nightjar’s soon-to-be-released anthology of bird-related stories, meanwhile, includes Claire Massey’s Feather Girls, a fantastic, fantastical fable about women as ducks (or ducks as women), which we also had the pleasure of hearing. Chorley-based Claire edits New Fairy Tales and picked up first prize for her atmospheric, imagination-packed Chorden-under-Water in the summer’s Oxfam Short Story Competition, of which the aforementioned Nicholas Royle was a judge.
Antwerp author Nicholas, coincidentally, is a colleague (on Manchester Metropolitan University’s creative writing programme) of Hidden Gem’s Sherry Ashworth, who kicked off the evening with all the introductions while husband and co-founder Brian hid at the back of the Foundation’s voluminous Engine Room. Sherry, herself a novelist (specialising in teen fiction), explained that: “The Hidden Gem Press is a small, privately owned press that is going to publish good-quality, readable fiction”, and described how: “Lecturing at MMU, I see so many top-class novelists and wanted to give them a platform.” She recognised that poetry and short fiction writers are fairly well catered for in Manchester with the likes of Comma and Nightjar, but that novels get less attention and “London publishers just don’t get the north”. Sherry and Brian are “born and bred northerners”, and, states their website, “have a distinctly north-west flavour”.
Hence, presumably, the choice of Lancashire lasses Zoe Lambert and Claire Massey as warm-ups to the main course: Hidden Gem’s debut novelist Emma Jane Unsworth with her food-inspired story about love. Sherry has known Emma since teaching her at school in north Manchester, and has watched and encouraged her talent develop, culminating in the June 2011 launch of Hungry, The Stars and Everything. With the lights right down, Emma gave us a couple of extracts from this debut: the prologue, which sees the young protagonist slyly scoffing a chocolate bar in the glow of Christmas tree lights in the dead of the night, then part of the chapter ‘Vintage Champagne’, a thirst-inducing ode to fizz. Featuring a main character called Helen Burns (oh, hello, Jane Eyre), the novel, says Sherry, is “like a Russian doll” with many layers of “witty, original, off-the-wall” prose. The snippets we were treated to certainly whetted the appetite. Reader, I can’t wait.
Post by Sarah-Clare Conlon
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