On the Bodies of Strangers by Hannah Stevens (EPUB)
- £6.00
- 138pp
- Epub available for direct download now!
Shortlisted for the W&A Working Class Writers’ Prize 2022. A collection of short stories linked by the theme of tattoos.
Our lives, our experiences and the people we encounter leave behind indelible marks. On the Bodies of Strangers explores marked lives and marked flesh. The stories in this collection are linked by a single thread: the tattoos of their protagonists, traces of experiences and meaning etched onto their skin.
These are stories about the chaos of ordinary lives, about people who are flawed, complicated, but always deeply human. From domestic abuse to unexpected friendship, mixing horror and hope, intimacies and lies, On the Bodies of Strangers explores the many ways we mark each other and ourselves as we deal with the complexities of human behaviour.
About Hannah Stevens
Hannah is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. In Their Absence, her debut collection of stories was published by Roman Books and was translated into Bulgarian by Ana Pipeva for Altera Press.
Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies including The Fairlight Book of Short Stories, High Spirits: A Round of Drinking Stories and Unthology 10: Fight or Flight. She is widely published in literary journals and magazines globally including Archer Magazine (Australia), Loose Lips (Canada), Necessary Fiction (USA), Litro Magazine, Idle Ink, Losslit, Fictive Dream and TSS Publishing (all UK).
She is currently working on her third collection of stories and a crime detective novel inspired by her time living and working in Taiwan. She has undertaken writing residencies including in Yangon, Myanmar, The Literature and Translation House in Sofia, Bulgaria and the Taiwan Literature Base, Taipei.
Hannah is also an editor and creative events producer and has worked around the world on projects using writing and storytelling as tools for positive social change, partnering with the BBC, the British Embassy, Greenpeace and many others.
Praise for Hannah Stevens
‘On the Bodies of Strangers is a collection that pulses with yearning for connection and desire for change. Each story captures moments that mark their characters, both figuratively and literally, leaving them transformed in ways both visible and unseen. As finely drawn as a beautiful tattoo, Hannah Steven’s stories reveal both the pain and joy that life can bring, and how a line as thin as that laid down by the tattooist’s needle can lie between the two.’
— Dan Powell, author of Looking Out of Broken Windows
‘Meticulously observed and emotionally compelling… Hannah Stevens is a vital voice in contemporary short fiction.’
—Victoria MacKenzie, author of For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain.
‘Hannah Stevens cares about how her stories are told.’
— Emma Lee, author of The Significance of a Dress
‘Hannah Stevens’s stories offer poignant glimpses into complex human lives. They sensitively capture the fluctuating micro-powers of relationships, the casual cruelties and kindnesses people share with each other. As incisive as a tattooist’s needle, they demonstrate that—as Stevens herself writes—sometimes beautiful things come from pain.’
— Jonathan Taylor, author of Scablands and Other Stories
‘… a writer capable of creating a meaningful world far beyond the remit of her prose.’
— Rebecca Burns, author of Catching the Barramundi and The Settling Earth
‘In a fashion similar to Robert Aickman and even Daphne du Maurier, Stevens pulls us into her world, but with a few notes of the unfamiliar.’
— Ross Jeffery, author of Metamorphosis and The Devil’s Pocketbook
‘Terribly beautiful and masterfully alarming stories. They’re part of my life now.’
— Ana Pipeva, Bulgarian translator of In Their Absence
‘… delicate and poignant, quietly unnerving, and macabre.’
— Yvonne Jewkes, author of An Architecture of Hope (on In Their Absence)