When I first read Ruby Cowling’s collection ‘This Paradise’, I almost threw the book across the room in a jealous rage. This beautiful, erudite and formally inventive book is weird and lush, tender and dark. I return to it again and again. Biophile is about an emotionally avoidant and sexually frustrated videogame designer called Danni who likes to bury herself in the ground. This is my favourite sort of character to write; complex, deeply sad, but irreverent and defiant nonetheless. I try to bring something of Danni into the women in my collection.
First published in The White Review, April 2014. Collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2020. You can read it here
A Personal Anthology 