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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.

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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...

On a wet, grey morning in March, William Boyd invited us into a large terraced house, half-way between the King’s Road and the Thames On the right-hand side of the thin corridor’s crisp white walls hung three dozen framed figurative paintings of identical sizes, each no bigger than a paperback book These were David Hockney’s series of flower sketches, executed on tablet computers and smart phones   The enthusiasm which William Boyd shows for these is in keeping with the evident pleasure he has in a range of creative arts – his career contains numerous film and television credits, alongside his notorious forays into the art world as the ‘lost’ abstract expressionist painter Nat Tate’s biographer Having authored a monograph in 1998 on Tate, backed by stellar co-conspirators David Bowie and Gore Vidal, he convinced many in the art world of the existence of this entirely fictitious artist who had supposedly killed himself at the age of thirty-two in 1960 – in the style of Hart Crane, by jumping off a boat – after destroying ninety-nine percent of his work Opposite Hockney’s digital essais sat a solitary Nat Tate, painted in preparation for the hoax by Boyd himself a decade or so ago   The interview took place in an excessively heated first-floor living-room; paintings in various styles cluttered the walls, illuminated by tall bay windows The central coffee table was stacked full of books, six or seven high – Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Lewis Crofts’ The Pornographer of Vienna prominent among them – testament to the meticulous research that goes into the composition of a William Boyd novel His next book, set in Freud’s Vienna, will be his sixteenth, in a career spanning three decades that includes several short-story collections and volumes of non-fiction   Perhaps his most ambitious projects have been the trilogy of works that tasked themselves with chronicling entire human lives, beginning with The New Confessions and Nat Tate: An American Artist These include his most celebrated novel, Any Human Heart, which tracks the course of its hero Logan Mountstuart through the chaos of the twentieth century Boyd’s life seems comparatively easy compared

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

feature

April 2013

Félix Fénéon, Bomb-Thrower

Tom McCarthy

feature

April 2013

Editors’ Note: On 25 April 2013, novelist Tom McCarthy announced the winner of the first annual White Review Short...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Terre Haute

Lauren Van Schaik

Prize Entry

April 2017

We’ve been quarantined in the school gym for three weeks when we realise just how much we’ve forgotten. Not...

feature

Issue No. 20

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 20

    As a bookish schoolchild in Galilee, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was invited to compose, and read...

 

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