Brand 06

Published twice a year out of the University of Greenwich , Brand is a magazine specialising in the short form. There’s short and micro fiction, poems, creative non-fiction, artwork and, refreshingly, performance texts and short plays. It has an edgy, urban aesthetic, and I feel has been getting stronger by the issue.

In her introduction to issue 6 just published, editor-in-chief Nina Rapi writes (in the context of addressing questions of collaborative and cross-genre writing): “Perhaps we should not be looking for either/or solutions but rather for both/and, openended-ness rather than closure, as unsettling as this may often be.” This strikes me as a fairly accurate description of what this magazine is trying to do.

Brand 06 includes a short poem of mine, ‘Measures for the Prevention of Crime’, alongside work by (among others) Gary Allen, Dzifa Benson, Linda Black, Angela Gardner, Sophie Mayer, Anjan Saha and John Saul, a short essay from Mikhail Karikis and an interview with Howard Barker.

There will be a launch of Brand 06 on 8 July at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank, during Text in Context: a Cross-Genre Symposium (part of the London Literature Festival).