On the eve of launch day for his second collection of short fiction, SAIL AWAY LAND, Ben Pester is joined by Nell Osborne, author of the award-winning GHOST DRIVER and Claire Carroll, author of THE UNRELIABLE NATURE WRITER. The three writers will be in conversation to discuss common themes in their writing: namely work-based weirdness, the afterlife, delusion and dream. 

Ben Pester is the author of the short story collection AM I IN THE RIGHT PLACE? and the novel THE EXPANSION PROJECT, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Nero Book Awards and the 2025 Goldsmiths Prize. He lives in London. 

SAIL AWAY LAND is Ben's third book, and is released on 4th June 2026. The stories in this uncommon and disarming collection are about normal things – losing the people we're closest to, forgiving them, finding love – but also about going to parties through a door in the back of a colleague's head, housebreaking in search of a sister's ghost, and asking the strangers in the kitchen to resurrect you at midnight.

Nell Osborne is a poet and novelist living in Bristol. In 2024, she published the poetry pamphlet Thank You For Everything with Monitor Books. In 2025, she published her debut novel, Ghost Driver, with Moist Books, which was a joint winner of the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize 2026. Daisy LaFarge calls Ghost Driver “addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar”. Nell is currently working on her second novel.

Claire Carroll’s writing has been published in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, The White Review, Prototype, Best of British Short Stories and others. Her debut collection of short stories, The Unreliable Nature Writer, was released in 2024 with Scratch Books. She is currently associate editor of short fiction for Ambient Receiver.

Tickets cost £7 and include a glass of wine or soft drink and £2 off the books. Presented by bookhaus