Both the newly published LONDON INCOGNITA, and my first collection HOLLOW SHORES, are now available in Audiobook from, produced by WF Howes!
They are available to buy via Audible- click on the links below.
A walk from Gravesend to the derelict Cliffe Fort and back, along the opening stretch of the Saxon Shore Way
Read MoreI am happy to say that the text of The White Heron Beneath the Reactor is complete and being proofread, and that Maxim has been going above-and-beyond with the artwork – something you can now judge for yourselves, as we are pleased to be sharing some images from the book and a short extract. Enjoy!
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A walk through unseasonable February sun to the Oare Gunpower Works, outside the town of Faversham, Kent. Gunpowder was manufactured here for many centuries, finally finishing in the 1930s.
On 2 April 1916, 108 people died in a blast at a munitions factory at Uplees, about a mile away from here.
Brian Dillon’s book, The Great Explosion, is an excellent history of the gunpowder industry in the area and the tragic accident of 1916.
Another great review of the This Dreaming Isle (Unsung Stories, 2018) anthology. They had the following to say about my story ‘Hovering (Or, a recollection of 25 February 2015)’.
‘Budden’s offering is a well-researched, cleverly written and prettily described tale. He has managed some impressively complex characterisation, considering that he only has a few pages to tell Iain’s story. His descriptions of this half-forgotten patch of Kentish coastline are charming and laced with a nostalgic melancholy that doesn’t outstay its welcome or romanticise the poverty that afflicts this area. Another contender for my favourite entry in the anthology!’
Read the full review at Fantasy Faction here: http://fantasy-faction.com/2019/this-dreaming-isle-edited-by-dan-coxon-an-anthology-by-unsung-stories
There is a sense of corroded history hanging heavy over Pegwell Bay. It is a place of invasion and amnesia, where you once could take a hovercraft to France, crossing the channel in as little as twenty-two minutes. Roman soldiers took their first steps into an alien land here. Vikings are commemorated for landing here. People sift the geological strata for signs the past, as they have done for generations. Once, just without reach of my own lifetime, it must have been a happy place, of arrivals and departures, holidaymakers and couples taking their first trips out of England.
Read MoreI had a nice write up in The Contemporary Small Press, reviewing the launch night of the Diisonance anthology in Bethnal Green. I read my story (from the forthcoming Hollow Shores) 'The Wrecking Days' at the night:
Gary Budden read from his new story collection The Wrecking Days [NOTE: it's called Hollow Shores] which explores themes of nature and narcotics, writing from the margins of society ‘where reality thinned a little.’ His piece suggested that the artificial and the natural are not opposing at all, instead they are transcendent. Budden writes about youthful and reckless days spent on the London marshes. In such places of in-between, on the fringes of London, Budden writes about notions of being and belonging: the idea that ‘memory is a marsh’ as the world diffuses in mist and nostalgia. The marshes act as a psychogeographical jettison between two places, between city and country, between artifice and nature. Such spaces, as Budden presents in his collection, allowed them to explore their minds, without ‘shutting parts of yourself down.’ It was ‘a way of seeing the world for what it really is,’ to find their own version of what it means to be free: to be and belong on their own terms. But Budden acknowledged, through his tales of the wrecking days, that being able to see the world as it is can also pull you apart.
Read the whole review here
I realised that everywhere, however small or boring you may first think it, is brimming with narrative, saturated in history, soaked in folklore and legend. It’s worth exploring and it’s worth writing about. You’ll be surprised what you can find.
Read More‘Perhaps it was his love of the mythical past, King Arthur and his knights, that brought him back. Or perhaps he felt as I did, that real change could only be affected in the place that you most understood: home’
Read MoreLook there. At the foot of Kit's Coty rests what I'd call a corn dolly. Straw, perhaps, done up like Little Bo Peep. At her feet rest a few miniature squash. They are just turning, the rot slowly setting in. This sight, so pagan and contemporary, is cheering. Make me smile. The mystery of who put the things there, and why, is one to be savoured. I never want to know the facts.
Read MoreThese are the notes for a talk I gave at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival 2015, as part of my involvement writing for the website Unofficial Britain. The other speakers were David Southwell, Gareth E. Rees and Tina Richardson.
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