By Stevan Balac, Illustration by Lamisa Chowdhury
1) Miles Fortnum-Mason
‘For me, the biggest thing was finding myself in my work. But not forgetting to find my work in myself’.
As a funky and hip London comedian (who is actually in his late thirties, slightly fat and steadily balding yet still somehow labelled a ‘young comic’) Miles is a mainstay of the British stand-up scene – despite now appearing solely on BBC panel shows and not having got on stage since his triumphant four minute ‘Live at the Apollo’ set in 2006. A graduate of Lesbian Studies (BSc) at the University of Oxford, Miles quickly became a working class folk-hero and is now much the talk of the popular Islington Eco-Coffee houses. After dipping his toe into screenwriting in 2022, you can catch his debut sitcom ‘Three Men in a Beanie’ on ITV4.
2) Harvey Delaunay Snogglesworth (Esquire)
‘Basically, I wanted to toss it off as long as possible… My parents continuing to finance my lavish charcuterie habits as I masqueraded as a City Journo was a big part of that’
As one of Britain’s few young right-wing writers, Harvey has broken through the glass ceiling which generally prohibits white, male Russel Group-University Graduates from writing in newspapers. But he hasn’t confined his work to mainstream journalism. Indeed, soon after graduating from the London School of Economics in 2021, he pursued a Master’s degree at Venereal College, Cambridge, where he won the prestigious Cecil Rhodes Award for Most Bigoted Dissertation for his ‘Essays on Culture: A Pompous Inquiry into the Skull Shapes and Eating Habits of the Scotch and French’. Shortly after, he began work on a hugely successful theatre adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic plays:
‘I just found myself looking at Richard III and thinking – why was he always the bad guy? It’s such a cliché that the wealthy patriarchal tyrant has to be the villain – and I wanted to flip that narrative on its head’.
Snogglesworth’s new production – in which King Richard wins the Battle of Bosworth, imposes martial law over England and cuts public transport and community arts funding by 87% – has attracted praise from a variety of critical outlets. These include the Spectator, Peter Hitchens and the Spectator. Catch ‘Richard III – Privatised’ at the Bury St. Edmunds Hippodrome until June 2023.
3) Synesthesia Fauxfur-Harrington
‘The most liberating thing about my husband’s death was having the opportunity to experiment socially, literarily and sexually. I realised that no one had ever really combined these to create a novel about romance. And even fewer had been set in charming country villages’.
‘The High Priestess of Smut’, as described by The Independent, has become a bastion for writers who have found their true calling later in life. Having published her first seventeen novels in her breakout year at the age of 47, Synesthesia has used personal tragedy to fuel her work. In late 2020, as lockdown tightened its grip upon Britain and couples up and down the country felt their relationships strained, her late husband unexpectedly committed suicide by stabbing himself in the back six times with a carving fork, tying his hands together and jumping into the boot of his wife’s car. Such themes of darkness and romantic tragedy can be seen in her latest novel ‘Mary-Lou and the Big, Strapping Gamekeeper’, in which a small village Vicar’s daughter begins a passionate affair with an attractive new employee at the local country estate.
