Mailing List


Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

Articles Available Online


Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

2011   I In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself   On July 23, at 3:29 in the afternoon, my death set out from Catania Its epicentre was my thin, supine body, my three hundred grams of human heart, my small breasts, my puffy eyes, my brain clubbed senseless, the wrist of my right arm draped over the edge of the tub, the other wrist submerged in a grim mojito of mint bubble bath and blood   On July 23, in the full heat of summer, down the dusty steps of my apartment building, oozing downward insidiously like oily, boiling veins of asphalt, my death propagated from Via Crispi 21 through all the neighbouring streets, to the cathedral with its pigeons and shorts-clad tourists, to the Amenano River, which reeks of carrion, and then vanished underground From my central nervous system to the streets of the city centre, from cold to hot, a perfect breakdown from which there is no return Down into the black heart of the lava stone, from the Roman aqueduct to the dirt paths of the Parco Gioeni, overgrown with weeds and littered with empty beer cans, to the scalding steps of the Church of the Santissima Trinità, to the dingy gray faces of saints Peter and Paul outside the Church of Sant’Agata al Borgo From there it shot off to the narrow sidewalks of the Scogliera, a scream in the depths of the sea, a puff of air in the seagulls’ lungs Amidst the noise of the beaches, the sweat, the wafting clouds of deodorant and suntan lotion Geometric under the spray of the shower, brutal down in the drains, down among the cigarette butts, inside used condoms, swirling down, martyred, into the sewers, down into the darkness and shit, tangled up in hair and the tails of passing rats After four hours my body temperature plunged, especially that of my internal organs   First the brain   Then the liver   Then the epidermis   Then the Ionian Sea: it hardened like a fist   At that point my death once again took wing It flew all the way up to Mount Etna, darting among

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

Art

July 2014

(holes)

Alice Hattrick

Kristina Buch

Art

July 2014

There are many ways to make sense of the world, through language, speech and text, but also the senses...

Prize Entry

April 2017

A JOURNEY THROUGH ☆ FAMOUS ☆ BY ♫ 'KANYE WEST' ♫

Liam Cagney

Prize Entry

April 2017

A twilit bedroom. Silence. Ceiling view of the base of a hyper-extended bed—the length of a catwalk. Slow pan...

feature

February 2011

The dole, and other bailouts

Chris Browne

feature

February 2011

One of my first actions as a Londoner was to sign on for as many benefits as I could...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required