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Swithun

@swithuncooper.bsky.social
183 followers 142 following 820 posts

Stay-at-home mother of none

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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 19h
Read it on a train & enjoy the envious looks of fellow passengers who believe your reading speed is second to none
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 20h
Well woodja look at that
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22h
So excited to see who Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami kick out of the "robbed of the gong" group chat today
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
I got "continuously acquires literary works". Continuously!
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I think it is possible I fancied John Virgo without exactly realising that this was what I was feeling, when I was about nine. ANYWAY now I'm picturing a full zodiac of Johns all wearing relevant patterned waistcoats and snookering according to type
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
my feelings like to play little game with my brain an my fingers: the game is called, "Express It!", the host is john virgo in a snazzy waistcoat an he does trick shots of sentences that i try to copy
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
i like to read an write, when i do it i often remember most suddenly: i like to read an write
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Kim Moore (former Forward Prize winner), Keith Jarrett (current Forward shortlistee) and Holly Pester (whose last two books were *everywhere*) are not "the remaining poets on the shortlist", as this article claims. They are on the shortlist ALONGSIDE Graham and Motion. For Crying Out Loud
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Also if you're going to use a photo of said former poet laureate or pulitzer winner, why not the latter, given THIS is Jorie Graham's current head shot?
Jorie Graham looking off to the side, grey hair teased and flowing, wearing sunglasses, a huge scarf that matches her outfit, and a powerfully pensive expression
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Nobody "leads" a shortlist! The authors are all on the shortlist together! Grr!
Screengrab of a headline from The Guardian's Books page, with a photogrpah of Andrew Motion looking unhappy in front of many shelves of books, and the announcement: "A former poet laureate and a Pulitzer winner lead T.S. Eliot prize shortlist"
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
My mum gave me Heart of Darkness and Animal Farm at the age of 12 to haul me out of a very heavy Point Horror / X-Files novelisation phase. Now I am a penniless librarian. Careful What You Wish For
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Didn't buy that copy of Palladian in Skoob a few months ago and have thought about it 2-3 times a week since, but it's fine, found the exact same edition in the Dalston Oxfam yesterday, for £1.99, sometimes satan *is* looking out for you 🥹
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I know everything about this person except their name 🥺
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I'm reading a charity shop copy of 'At the Source' by Gillian Clarke, an experience elevated by its previous reader being a poet who clearly knew her, at one point quite closely. Who?? This extra layer of text is making me very emotional.
The author biography page of 'At the Source', mentioning Gillian Clarke co-founding Tŷ Newydd in 1990. Handwritten beneath this is: "25 years ago. We were still in Lavender Cottage"Text from 'At the Source' on bilingualism and the Welsh language, with a handwritten "yes" and two ticks, and "like the glimpses in Lewes?"A mostly-blank page from At the Source, with "Such a different life. For her Black Cwrt is the central place & was there since 1970 - when we were in Belfast. For work she's spun out @ the world. For us our work - places dominated us and we moved house a lot."A page of 'At the Source" where Clarke calls a poem "a song held true by cadence." 'Cadence' is circled and in the margin is written "Gillian used that word for my 'at the very borders' poem"
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Dooneen, Dooneen, Dooneen Doonee-ee-een, I'm begging of you please get more exposure off the back of this shortlisting
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
One morning as Gregor Samsa woke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his friend's kitchen into an enormous mollusc killer :(
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Woke early and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen, whereupon, in the dark, I stepped on a slug. I won't disturb you by describing the loose, slow way it burst under my heel, or the viscous remains I had to wipe from my skin and the floor. I mean only to record the experience as exorcism.
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I enjoyed it, but it's not about Neitszchean eternal recurrence (he's clear that your life will always be the same and you'll never remember you've lived before) or reincarnation. I guess it's more about multiverse novel? Still, I think worth looking at for why "living again" has such appeal to us
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Definitely Cloud Atlas. (And Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, very clearly inspired by it.) On a very literal level, The Incarnations by Susan Barker; on a more metaphorical level, Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham. Not really but almost: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson.
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Lavinia Greenlaw in the Faber office running from one side of the desk to the other as she gives her poet-self editorial feedback
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"Once the film is over, the actor becomes an actor again, the character remains a character, but from their union is born a composite creature who participates in both, envelops them both: the star." Oh Edgar Morin we love you get up
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Found a copy of Edgar Morin's Les Stars for £1.50 in Cancer Research what the fuck is going on in Crystal Palace
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
They're a mix, it's curious but a delight
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Please join my new band DEATH BY DYNAMITE
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
A black and white aerial photo of the wrecked Crystal Palace after the fire in 1936. Beneath, in Comic Sans, the text "dawn breaks over the smoking ruins"
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Excellent trip to Crystal Palace Museum today. NOT ONLY are its photo captions all incredibly poetic - "brickdust billows from open windows", "dawn breaks over smouldering ruins", etc - BUT ALSO these are presented in ✨️Comic Sans💝
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I was briefly a PA for a popular writer of light verse, and I once recited all of So Hard to her, thinking the fluidity and ease of the rhyming would convince her of PSB's brilliance. Her disdain was, I think, the beginning of the end of our working relationship. That and I crashed her car twice.
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I'm always hoping you'll be faithful but you're not, I suppose We've both given up smoking 'cause it's fatal - so whose matches are those?
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
She really was taking notes all those years at Xenomania towers, which perhaps can't be said for the rest of the band -- learning how to come at a song from two different angles at once and throwing a street's worth of kitchen sinks at it in the process (see covert art, I guess)
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Riddled with bangers. And with brilliantly silly lyrics like "if my balls of steel have got stuck halfway down your pipe / I've got some KY time to open open open wide"
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
If God wanted me to read books instead of eat them, why did he make ME illiterate and THEM delicious?
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Had to explain 'Educating Rita' to one of the kids I was tutoring today, and the RELIEF on her face when I told her that Michael Caine and Julie Walters do not, in fact, fuck
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Try ringing the National Poetry Library - they'll have back issues in the archive, so if you know the year, they can get the physical copy and email you a scan. (I used to do this through their enquiries service when I worked there, and I assume they still offer this...)
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Inexplicably, some of those Pan anthologies were in our Year 5 library. (All two shelves of it.) I remember being ten years old reading 'The Terrapin' by Patricia Highsmith during "silent reading time", and having to fake an illness to be allowed outside for some air.
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
One way to make reading the new Rachel Cusk novel more fun is to pretend that M from 'Life of M' is the the same M as M from James Bond
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It was about 1990. I was, I think, 6. The last thing I ever hear, as my consciousness fades and I re-enter the spirit realm, will be the girl who drinks poison groaning and screaming for her mother in the night.
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
One morning our entire primary school was led into the assembly hall, sat cross-legged in rows with the blinds down, as they screened 'Apaches' on the projector usually reserved for displaying the lyrics to hymns. I guess a local child had recently died on some farming equipment?
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
On the writer development thing I did last year, it felt pretty universal. It seemed like a lot of scared agents and editors looking at the stats, and at the rise of the right, and saying "well it's getting even harder to publish minorities" rather than thinking "let's do something about that"
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Booker shortlist announcement tonight, and the algorithm has decided to send me SO MANY "I read the longlist and here are my predictions" videos that I think it'd be best if they announce M John Harrison and Makenna Goodman and then the mic cuts and there's a powercut until November
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I have won prizes for my writing, I run "essay skills" classes at a university... but no I cannot create even one sentence for a cover letter without sounding like that Madonna interview where they translated her answers into Hungarian and back again
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Ah, the true test of how far your life has fallen: the job application form
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Ah, so this is why all my plumpest Christmas geese honk the loudest before slaughter
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I used to spend St Botolph's Eve with his cousin, Petite Baroness Size
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Some say Shapely Lord Size was the birth name of Screaming Lord Sutch
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
To be fair they also need to navigate the rough and rocky terrain between the reformer pilates studio and the big Waitrose.
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Also I imagine this Telegraph article is part of whatever complex system we're now in where disordered eating has been widened to also exploit men: it's to divert meal prepping protein bros into spending £16 a day on high fibre salmon poke bowls that will show up in next week's advertorial
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I remember this article so well. At the time I was living in London earning £800 a month, eating pasta salads I'd make in bulk at the start of the week for about £4. Whoever that journalist was, she was quite young and quite... "Clapham house share". It felt like a psyop funded by Little Waitrose
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Sure Swithun, drink two of those Australian coffees that make it feel like your brain is vibrating in your skull & then go stare at a Vantablack oval, brilliant choice
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Currently tripping my absolute balls off at the Anish Kapoor exhibition
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Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Sometimes (like just now) my mum texts me an X, unprompted, no accompanying message, and I know it's a sign of love but it also feels like I'm being targeted by a serial killer
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