Launch of Lorem Ipsum by Oli Hazzard, with Maria Sledmere

Prototype invites you to celebrate the launch of Oli Hazzard's debut novel, Lorem Ipsum, with an online event hosted by Maria Sledmere.

Oli will be reading from the book, and in conversation with Maria.

Lorem Ipsum consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means ‘following the brush’.

This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely.

Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of ‘shared time’. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken.

Oli Hazzard is the author of three books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012), Blotter (Carcanet, 2018) and Progress: Real and Imagined (SPAM Press, 2020), and a book of literary criticism, John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange: The Minor Eras (Oxford University Press, 2018). He lives in Glasgow, and teaches at the University of St Andrews.

Maria Sledmere is editor-in-chief at SPAM Press and a member of A+E Collective. Recent publications include Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press), neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press), varnish//cache (If A Leaf Falls) and Polychromatics (Legitimate Snack). With Rhian Williams, she co-edited the anthology the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe). Current work includes a seasonal pamphlet series, Sonnets for Hooch, in collaboration with Mau Baiocco and Kyle Lovell. Her debut collection, The Luna Erratum, is forthcoming from Dostoyevsky Wannabe.