‘Mandy Sutter has a strong, spirited, firmly contemporary voice… her easy conversational style is spattered with striking images.’ Odyssey magazine
Short stories
I’ve published about thirty short stories in magazines like Mslexia and anthologies like Are You She (Tindal Street Press, 2004) and Parenthesis (Comma Press, 2006) and and have now started work on a single author collection. It’s called The Habit of Loneliness and is set partly in Nigeria (where I grew up as a child) and partly in Leeds (where I lived for fifteen years as an adult).
People who read my stories often ask whether they have an autobiographical content. The truth is that some of the things that happen in my stories are made up; some aren’t. But when I’m making things up, I hope they sound credible. On the other hand, when I’m writing down something that really happened, I hope nobody will guess. If you can make any sense of that, let me know.
In the end I think what’s important is that whether a story actually happened in real life or not, it must happen again in the right place: on the page and for the reader.
You can listen to The Therapist, one of the stories in Are You She and buy the book on Amazon.
Poetry
My poems have been anthologised and appeared in lots of poetry magazines, like The North, Rialto, Stand and on BBC Radio.
I still have a few copies left of my two collections, Permission to Stare (Slow Dancer Press, 1994) and Game (Smith Doorstop Books 1995). Get in touch if you would like one.
Various of my poems appear here and there on the web.
Two recent ones are Private Cities, written for the Bradford Square project.
Reading is about attending a book reading and Negative Equity is about me being not quite sure whether I am a southerner or a northerner.
Novel
My as yet unpublished novel, The Wonderful Scent of Cut Wood is, as described at Annette Green Author’s Agency a comedy about a belated coming of age.
Having recently had some new ideas about the novel as a result of a year’s free mentoring I won from a manuscript agency, I’m currently working on a rewrite under the new title of The Size of It.