Launch of the novel The Headland by Abi Curtis

Abi will be in Conversation with Naomi Booth fiction writer and Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.

About The Headland

A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are.

It is 1987 after a devastating hurricane on England’s south coast. Artist Dolores is walking the beach of the Headland when she discovers something alive in a piece of driftwood. Both beguiling and terrifying, Violet seems neither human nor animal; has she been created by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout? Or is she from somewhere else entirely?

Decades later, after her death, Dolores’s son Morgan returns to the Headland and finds a journal she wrote before his birth. As he reads, Morgan’s own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable. The journal challenges Morgan’s ideas about love and belonging, and the very fabric of time.

"The Headland hooked me from the very start with its powerful, sensory descriptions of the south coast and the great storm of 1987. Out of that wild night emerges the mysterious presence at the heart of this novel: an entity that glimmers, in Curtis’ poetic hands, with alien beauty and with the stunning force of grief. This is a strange, dark, gorgeous song of a novel." - Naomi Booth author of Sealed, Exit Management and Animals at Night (Dead Ink Books)
“A creaturely, stylish, kind-hearted book.” – Daisy Hildyard, author of The Second Body and Emergency (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Abi Curtis is Professor of Creative Writing at York St John University, UK. She is the author of two poetry collections, Unexpected Weather and The Glass Delusion, and has been awarded both an Eric Gregory Award and Somerset Maugham Award. Her debut novel was Water & Glass, a speculative climate change story (2017). She was highly commended in both the Bridport, Alpine Fellowship and Fish Prizes in 2022 for three of her short stories.
Naomi Booth is the author of the short story collection Animals at Night and the novels Exit Management and Sealed. Exit Management was listed as a Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2020 and Animals at Night was shortlisted for the 2023 Edge Hill Prize, winning the 'Reader's Choice' award. Naomi's other short fiction has been listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Galley Beggars Short Story Prize, and anthologised in Best British Short Stories. Naomi grew up in West Yorkshire and lives in York. She teaches at Durham University, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.

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