Anoushka
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spittingyarn.bsky.social
Anoushka
@spittingyarn.bsky.social
Boooooks. Writing.
Neurodiverse family.
📚 Shortlisted for The Curae Prize ‘25
Pinned
The Curae II available for pre-order from @renardpress.com!

💚 Intro by @bookwormvaught.bsky.social.

💚 And a piece about dead butterfly epiphanies and metamorphosis by me.

🛒 renardpress.com/books/the-cu...

💚 All proceeds to Carers Trust & Carers UK.
Reposted by Anoushka
Every Sunday I’ll be contributing a paperback column to the Observer’s New Review. Kicking things off is Driver by Mattia Filice (@nyrb-imprints.bsky.social), who’s poured his experience of 2 decades working on the French rail network into an extraordinary verse novel. observer.co.uk/culture/book...
November 2, 2025 at 1:51 PM
Please direct me to your favourite braided essays. Cheers. #WritingCommunity
November 2, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Join us for the online launch of the #CuraePrize anthology from @renardpress.com!

The Curae Prize is a literary award for unpaid carers. Expect fresh, vibrant fiction, nonfiction & poetry.

📆 12 November 2025, 6pm

🎟️ www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-curae-... (free)

#writingcommunity #writersky #carers
November 2, 2025 at 11:29 AM
Reposted by Anoushka
Thanks to all those who joined us yesterday evening for the relaunch of The Barbellion Prize, a book prize for chronically ill and disabled authors founded by @jgoldsmith.bsky.social. Our generous audience raised more than £400 on the night! You can donate here: barbellionprize.org/donate/
donate | The Barbellion Prize
barbellionprize.org
November 2, 2025 at 8:30 AM
The Curae II available for pre-order from @renardpress.com!

💚 Intro by @bookwormvaught.bsky.social.

💚 And a piece about dead butterfly epiphanies and metamorphosis by me.

🛒 renardpress.com/books/the-cu...

💚 All proceeds to Carers Trust & Carers UK.
October 24, 2025 at 7:06 PM
The cover has landed for the 2nd #CuraePrize anthology. A selection of fiction, nonfiction & poetry written by unpaid carers, a strangely marginalised group. It’s rare that our voices are amplified, but we’re here holding up our loved ones & growing in unexpected ways. Out 15/11. @renardpress.com
October 13, 2025 at 5:06 PM
August 24, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Thought this was well-articulated, on the appeal of Trump to the unconscious - from Maggie Nelson’s “Like Love”.
August 12, 2025 at 9:18 AM
#CrispWall update. Note heart cut outs.
August 10, 2025 at 12:19 PM
My youngest and I do quite a lot of escape rooms together as a duo and I have been trying to understand the appeal. For me, I think it’s just looking through other people’s drawers.
August 2, 2025 at 10:50 AM
Today I saw the bus that is my mental image of a bus when I think the word “bus”. Looks like a seven year old’s drawing. I love it.
August 1, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Took my transport enthusiast autistic son to Battersea bus garage to contemplate some of his favourite units through the fence. Had a lovely chat with a driver who has an 8yo autistic son. I love that sense of “game recognises game” when parent/carers meet. A shortcut from stranger to friend.
June 1, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Excitingly, the winning & shortlisted (🙋‍♀️) entries for the #Curae Prize will be published in an anthology by lovely @renardpress.com later in the year. For an emerging (but wizened) writer, this feels like getting off the mark. And doing it with a cohort of fellow carer-writers is really meaningful.
June 1, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Congratulations to the #Curae Prize winners 2025! What a joy it has been to be a part of all this. Can’t wait to read all the winning and shortlisted entries.📚📚📚
June 1, 2025 at 11:43 AM
Reposted by Anoushka
I’ve had a lot of correspondence today about the #Curae I had mentioned that it might not run again and had noted, first and foremost, that demands on me are high. It’s really worth explaining. I have done as much as it possibly can but I don’t think my position is clear so I thought I’d state it ❤️
May 16, 2025 at 4:36 PM
I’m coming to the end of a Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck & have hugely benefited from the structure and content of it. Funding for a carer to attend a Creative Writing course could be just what they need to keep writing. Please consider supporting @bookwormvaught.bsky.social’s #Curae scholarship.
If you’d like to express an early interest in funding the Curae scholarship in CREATIVE WRITING then you can email me @ thecuraeprize@gmail.com. We are looking at £6 to 12k
Love, Bookworm
❤️
May 16, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Quite proud of my ‘hood’s efforts (this is outside the Russian embassy in London), but Prague…👏👏👏
May 14, 2025 at 1:12 PM
Honoured, surprised and perplexed to find my name on the nonfiction category shortlist for the #Curae prize. Thank you, judges! Congratulations, fellow shortlistees!🎉
Thread. It is a great honour to announce the shortlist for the 2025 #Curae prize for unpaid carers

POETRY CATEGORY

Mistletoe. Sam Garvan
Diagnosis. Elizabeth Loudon
Sinkhole. Charlotte Ansell
I Love Him (like salt and water). Emma Wilson
The Shop at the End of a Wave. Ia Kozoboli.
thecuraeprize.uk
May 1, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Reposted by Anoushka
We're giving away this VANISHING WORLD goodie bag to a lucky winner on both Bluesky and Instagram 🍎

To be in with a chance of winning all you need to do is:
- Follow @grantabooks.bsky.social
- Repost
- Leave a comment tagging a friend (more tags = more entries)
- Enter by 2 May

See below for T+Cs.
April 28, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Was feeling this grey Mondayish Monday in my bones but then suddenly thought about how it isn’t Christmas and won’t be for ages. Feel MUCH better now.
February 24, 2025 at 11:27 AM
Reposted by Anoushka
I am so, so tired. And I know you are, too.

Here's “Death blowing bubbles,” 18th century. The bubbles symbolize life's fragility. This plaster work appears on the ceiling of Holy Grave Chapel in Michaelsberg Abbey, Bamberg, Germany. After the monastery’s dissolution, it became a hospital.
February 13, 2025 at 11:54 AM
The library?
February 23, 2025 at 9:00 AM
More ✨glamorous✨ bus quests with the bigger boy this weekend.
January 20, 2025 at 10:02 AM
Thought this was a good and important article by @johnharris1969.bsky.social Hope it gets read. Where are the disabled adults in your groups / classes / nights’ out?

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Shut away and ignored: thousands of disabled adults are at the frontier of the human rights struggle | John Harris
When you attend your local choir or yoga class, just stop and think – where are the disabled adults, asks Guardian columnist John Harris
www.theguardian.com
January 20, 2025 at 9:54 AM
Don’t mean to be a curmudgeon but I’m glad that’s over.
January 6, 2025 at 12:29 AM