The Leavening

The Leavening is a debut speculative fantasy set in an occupied city - coded Liverpool, written from inside a language that was never meant to survive. At its centre is a constructed lexicon derived from Mincéir Thari ( also known as Cant or De Gammon), the encoded living language of Irish Traveller communities, built into a cipher that my chronically ill protagonist Kildare carries on her skin as ancestral marks. Drawing on my own Traveller heritage, the novel is an act of reclamation as much as storytelling: excavating a suppressed linguistic tradition to construct new vocabularies for gender, power, bodily autonomy and belonging. Caid the ancient cross-country ball game of travelling workmen, a communal ritual that predates and resists regulation is reclaimed here: taken underground, taken back by women. Fermentation is the magic system: slow, transformative, working from the inside out. A world recognisably ours, refracted through what was almost erased.

The Leavening extends the momentum of my practice into the mechanisms of language - slowly, over years, with the same political intention. Where participatory and durational work builds alternative realities in real time, the novel constructs them through a single sustained act of imagining. The long form holds the interior life of resistance, the texture of an occupied self - and the novel's world is built from the same materials as my wider practice: communal knowledge, suppressed histories, the political life of the body, and the insistence that imagining otherwise is a form of radical action.