Writing

In 21 pieces about a variety of urban and rural locations in England, Scotland and Wales, Charlie Hill takes us on a tour of post-industrial Britain. From escaping to the Highlands during the pandemic to a trip to a Soho boozer, from camping in a church in Herefordshire to playing football in inner-city Birmingham, from feeling twitchy in a Gwynedd resort town to a run-in with the builders of HS2, This Albion draws on the theories of the Situationists and the writing of Mark Fisher to create an original and accessible snapshot of a society divided and brought together by geography and class.

‘Charlie Hill’s ‘snapshots’, literal and metaphoric, sustain a nice balance between happenstance and revelation. He moves off from the first direct utterance, through a series of encounters and epiphanies across a fractured kingdom of used-book pits, stalled trains, convenience stores, memory resorts, in quest of the telling detail. Which, in some cases, he is too tactful to expose. Topography becomes confession, as we realise that the weather is all inside. These anecdotes of otherness are a good-hearted adjudication of a naked self. And that’s more than enough to ask of prose that understands just where to stop.’ Iain Sinclair

‘Charlie Hill's This Albion is a remarkable socio-cultural examination of Britain today. Hill writes with a beautiful prose style that is sharp, poetic, funny, tragic and full of life.' Aaron Kent

'Charlie Hill is a modern day walker-writer. This is a collection of thought-provoking, often joyous, always fascinating observations that blaze with insight about the dynamic link between people and place.' Kerry Hadley-Pryce

‘I'm yet to meet a Charlie Hill book I don't like. A true writers' writer. This Albion is no exception, as he takes us on a beautiful, hilarious, dark and awe-inspiring peregrination through the off-kilter and unusual landscapes of the UK. Graveyards give way to abandoned warehouses that lead us to bookshops and canal tow paths, punctuated occasionally with a glimpse and echo of sublime and uncanny birds. Hill notices things others don't - he's a poet in that sense, and draws us closer to what is most beautiful and what is most bleak in the everyday moments and everyday things that are always present, but so often seem insignificant. These travelogue vignettes give us a taste of this idiosyncratic world but build into each taste a stratigraphic studying of place-identity - the way places shape us and how we affect them.’ Dr Rob Francis

'For Hill, to move is to think is to write.' Elliptical Movements

'Though simple and straightforward on the surface, Hill’s writing conjures up a deep poetic beauty.' Psychogeographic Review
‘Perhaps I pre-empted his own question, as he later ponders whether this observation — this recording diaristically of surfaces — has appropriate value. The question arises in the text itself, as Hill challenges his own approach, nakedly recording his doubts as to whether the political urgency of the present moment demands a more participatory writing. It’s a dangerous move for an artist, a speaker, or a teacher, to reveal their own doubts: it can dent the confidence that you’d wish to cultivate among your audience. But, by this point, Hill has set out his stall and we will already have decided whether or not to trust him. His gamble pays off: and he ends on a sort of cliff-hanger for his own artistic development, perhaps aware that his thoughts will find a mirror in his readers’ and their own struggles with complicity, complacency and praxis.’ The Urban Wanderer

What is the nature of modern ‘madness’? What is it like to suffer with grief or PTSD or obsessive love? To struggle with other people, or your environment? How do you view others who see the world differently to you? And what does it mean to be considered odd, or eccentric?

'Hill renders the ordinary extraordinary in meticulously observed stories that are wry, insightful, and beautifully written.' Carys Bray

'Charlie Hill turns the conventional short story on its head. Taking situations with which we’re all familiar yet soaring above the well-trod lowlands of plot and character, these exceptional stories explore in lucid prose the ways in which the modern urban world impacts on our collective psyche.' Elizabeth Baines

'The title gives a nod to Bukowski and in the first story 'a walk by the river' there's echoes of early Carver in the underlying sense of menace. Not a fan of second person narration, I finally realized how it can work and why it so often doesn't - the writer has to write with complete authority to carry if off and Hill does that here with aplomb. In 'the man who walked backwards' we have a delicate prose poem on mortality. In 'Stuff' we have what reads like a Brummie Kelman, chronicling the humdrum of existence in order that we might know it better, moment to moment. A poet of suburbia, Hill's sharply observed and sometimes sharply observing characters are so deeply immersed in place that we can't help but listen carefully for what they are telling us while also enjoying their sly humour along the way. There's a beautiful economy at times too, like this note-perfect summation of an office: I worked in an office. The office had ceiling tiles on the ceiling and carpet tiles on the floor. In a better world, everyone would be reading this kind of stuff, rather than the saccharine shite that fills the bestseller lists and gets whispered about in hushed tones on TV. Give me Charlie Hill any day of the week, but especially on a Monday' Neil Campbell

'You know what the life of the mind is made of? Of course you do, but you can't say. Charlie Hill can though. Bits of it anyway. The Devil. The Details. Paranoia, Garden Centres, Obsession, Baby wipes, Baby Octopuses. Street names in the brain, brilliant prose poem narratives that purple up what's happening with the endless compression and head sweats we all of us suffer. Poetry can do things no other medium can, and here we have a collection doing that - attempting to mark the ineffable with the formally brilliant and textually rich. "vile confusion and obscene clarity", that's what good poetry is, both of them together.' SJ Fowler

‘An exceptionally gifted writer.’ Edge Hill Prize, 2024

‘By turns disturbing, playful, witty, inventive, these stories conjure vivid images out of the unpromising material of suburban life, and engage the reader in the contemplation of the extraordinary nature of the ordinary.’ Shiny New Books

‘Truly standout writing.’ Everybody’s Reviewing

An ‘anthology’ of short stories on the theme of ‘the state of us’, this collection contains stories of varying stylistic approaches that touch on subjects such as suburban parenting, the International Space Station, climate breakdown, and a chance encounter between the street photographers Helen Levitt and Vivian Maier.

'Wonderful - a collection of brilliantly inventive absurdist tales from our increasingly fictional reality. Charlie Hill's eclectic pantheon of characters try to make sense of a strange world. They never can. It's not their fault. It makes no sense. How else to describe this book? If Kafka had come from Birmingham and written about climate change, feminism, war, food, parenting and space travel, then the result might well have resembled The State of Us. The best sort of hilarious and poignant satire.' Joanna Kavenna

'Charlie Hill’s excellent The State of Us is a clear-eyed, comic, occasionally angry but deeply humane flick through climate collapse, war, political instability, armageddon, competitive parents and warring foodies. He never lets his ire overwhelm his empathy, though, and has an auteur’s eye for a perfectly-timed hard cut. It’s funny but it’s not funny, and in that uncomfortable space Hill captures something essential about humanity.' Will Ashon

‘Viscerally evocative…and intelligent and quirky read’ Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home
‘Absolutely terrific.’ Outside Left\

A formally original memoir offering a clear-eyed, non-nostalgic look at growing up in the 70's, 80's and 90's.

Charlie Hill is the chronicler Birmingham needs. Clear-eyed and sharply written, this a memoir - a set of poetic postcards, really - which offers a kaleidoscope of the past, a history of Charlie and of the city itself. It never strays into nostalgia or cosiness, but rather offers the reader glittering bright glimpses of the eighties, nineties and noughties. Natalie Haynes

‘Charlie Hill’s laconic and bitter-sweet memoir of afternoons -no, years!- frittered away in the edgy suburbs of south Birmingham during the stoned and feckless last decades of the 20th century is mordant, touching, and -uniquely for a work of autobiography- entirely without vanity. Hill’s many, notable gifts as a writer -as he steers his readers through the callow excesses of youth towards the getting of wisdom that comes with age (and family life)- include his narrative economy, his honesty, and his pin-point clarity. This is truly how it was for all of us back then, when we were free and tireless, young and lost.’ Jim Crace

‘Hill’s economic autobiography is a simplistic list of addresses, dead end jobs, cultural ephemera, and brief assignations, garnished with two or three short paragraphs of barely formed reflection. And yet, in reducing his life to these most basic elements, it manages to be a more profound comment on existence then many more self-consciously analytical efforts. As if to confound Wittgenstein, it appears the unexamined life was worth living after all.’ Stewart Lee

‘Utterly rancid. I loved it’ Stewart Home

‘Unique and beguiling… a book about memory, and how we recall and record the textures of lived experience.’ the Quietus
‘A sublime rendition of a state that seems to be specifically located in the hearts and souls of those who inhabit Britain’s second city.’ Tribune

‘An important contribution to working class life writing.’ Culture Matters

‘This is a book I loved reading. Unforgettable.’ Tears in the Fence
‘A wonderfully eccentric and entertaining memoir – I can’t think of another one quite like it!’ Everybody's Reviewing - Review by Alan McCormick

‘The man who walked backwards lived in a house for people who had no house to live in. The house was called Ilfracombe House. I don’t know why. When I moved into Ilfracombe House, I met the man who walked backwards. He was always there, walking backwards through the house. He walked up and down the stairs backwards, in and out of the lounge backwards, through the kitchen backwards. He even walked backwards along the hall.’

'With Walking Backwards Charlie Hill gives us dense fragments of closely-observed lives, obsessive interiors and broken, unspoken loves. The result is touching, funny, melancholy and entirely worth reading.' AL Kennedy

‘Intensely observed fragments of everyday life…all give pause for thought.’ Irish Times

'All the best prose writers have a love of poetry. Charlie Hill is a real writer, and a very good one too.’ Sabotage Reviews

The work explores mid-20th century Existentialism through the lens of urban hyperrealism, depicting a week in the life of a thirty-something man who experiences a sudden, profound existential crisis where his daily impetus stalls.

'An engrossing piece that…were the author French and his readers all French, might well have been regarded as a worthy late edition to the school of existentialist literature' Nicholas Royle, Best British Short Stories (Salt Publishing, 2017)

'Sensitive, evocative and touching, Stuff begins with a density of detail and then sheds names, memories, family, home and belongings as the narrator leads the reader to a brink.' Alison Moore

'Signification and silence are the two outstanding characteristics of Stuff. From cracked pavements to supermarkets, from suburban fascists to grass blowing in the wind, we know where we are, on the way to a full-length novel. But then there is the brevity, the blank pages, the lure of the sea, and we don't.' This Space
‘In the genre of Urban Hyperrealism; life as a series of Joycean epiphanies… witty, beautifully detailed and compelling in its depiction of a modern alienation.’ Wales Arts Review

A novel that follows independent bookseller Richard Anger and neurologist Lauren Furrows as they investigate SNAPS (Spontaneous Neural Atrophy Syndrome), a mysterious and deadly condition linked to the mediocre bestsellers of author Gary Sayles.

'The novel is a delight as it sets up its target – the mediocrity of commercialised popular culture – and then throws every ball in the shy to knock it down. It’s sharp, caustic, intelligent, often hilarious and, yes, ultimately serious, as decent satire should be, as well as providing a handy check-list for movements in modern art and literature, and a hard look at the way these are commodified.' Charles Lambert

‘Sharp, funny and shrewd’ Financial Times

‘An indignant romp… several glorious moments.’ London Review of Books

‘Hill is a smart writer - provocative but not juvenile, ironic but not weary. He has fashioned a serrated little weapon of war here.’ Morning Star

How far would you go to win the love of a woman? Arch, a wannabe poet living in a bohemian Birmingham suburb, likes to party and has no time for love or seriousness. Then he meets the mysterious Vee. They have a one-night stand and she leaves him the next day with a challenge: throw yourself into the world and its possibilities. Discovering that Vee has gone to Croatia to photograph the war, Arch begins to expand his horizons.

‘Every city in Britain has its Moseley, the edgy, arty Birmingham anti-suburb where the studes and crusties come to rent and squat. Charlie Hill's intelligent and witty The Space Between Things captures their culture with brutal, unpretentious clarity. His novel charts the years between Moseley’s first rave and the height of the road protests, an age of well-meaning self-indulgence, where the partying never ends but the politics never quite get going. It is, like the suburb itself, playful, unruly and bursting with generous energy. Charlie Hill is a real writer.’ Jim Crace

‘What I like very much about this novel is that it vividly captures a moment in Britain's recent past, and takes us inside a world and a milieu which most readers won't have known before. And of course, as a tragic love story, it packs a considerable punch.’ Jonathan Coe

'Rich in wry social commentary, but also funny and linguistically dexterous.' The Observer

'Wonderfully observed' the Times

‘An engaging debut’ the Guardian