The Pin Jar: Sam Reid in conversation with Lara Haworth - Islington

Join us with Sam Reid, in conversation with Lara Haworth, to discuss The Pin Jar, a hypnotic tapestry of weird, dark tales that reaches into the earth-deep roots of the past to pull us deftly into the present.

A story-cycle from the deep taproot of the Sussex 'Weald', The Pin Jar is a record of vernacular folk tales as transcribed by the enigmatic composer and amateur ethnographer Francis J. Cardwell, who habitually, compulsively, taped the various stories and songs he encountered in the now lost pubs of his county. Earthy, half-haunted, dialect-rich - this is the true stuff of deep weird England. Sam Reid's beguiling debut presents us with the folk process of story-telling and song reimagined as a radical literary experiment and fictional archive of place-memory.

Sam Reid is the editor of Field, a biannual literary magazine that platforms emerging UK voices alongside established novelists and poets. He is also the presenter of the Field Ramble podcast, a fortnightly long-form interview with some of the most exciting and innovative writers working in English today. His poetry has previously been published by Dunlin Press and he is a graduate of the MMU creative writing MA programme. He lives in Sussex and spends as much time in its forests hills and sea as possible.

Lara Haworth is a writer, filmmaker and a political researcher, specialising in the UK’s move to become carbon zero by 2050. Having turned an extract from Monumenta into a short story, she won a Bridport prize for it in October 2022. In the same year she won a prize for her poem ‘The Thames Barrier’ in the Café Writers Poetry Competition, wrote and narrated a podcast, The Swimming Pool, for NTS radio and was commissioned to write a long autofiction feature, Mistakes are Pure Colour, for Extra Extra Magazine. Her writing workshop, Letters That Will Never Be Sent, was featured in a BBC World Service documentary. Her film, All the People I Hurt With My Wedding, won the LGBT prize at the Athens International Monthly Film Festival, and her latest film, Grief is a Hungry Ghost, has premiered at festivals including Japan International, New York Tri-State and Munich New Wave. Her first novel, Monumenta, was shortlisted for the Nero Prize for Debut Fiction.