PRESS RELEASE: Publication day for our first fiction title: ‘Jude’ by Elin Heron
Lucent Dreaming has been operating as a creative writing magazine since April 2018 from Cardiff. In 2023, we began our single-author trade publishing venture, launching
We are super excited to share that two of our previously published contributors have recently released debut books of their own. Bethany Handley’s Cling Film (Seren, 2025) and Richard Hooton’s The Margaret Code (Sphere, 2025) are now available to buy or order online and via your favourite bookshops.
Bethany Handley, first published in issue 8 of Lucent Dreaming, is an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist from Monmouthshire. Named one of the UK’s ten most influential disabled people in politics, law, and media by the Shaw Trust 2024, she campaigns for disability rights and better access to nature. She won Creative Future’s Gold Prize for Creative Non-fiction 2023 and was shortlisted for the RSL Jerwood Poetry Prize 2024. An Ambassador for Country Living’s Access for All campaign, Wales Coast Path, and Ramblers Cymru, her debut poetry pamphlet Cling Film was published by Seren in 2025 and was named one of the 40 best books, films and events of 2025 by Country Living. She co-edited Beyond / Tu Hwnt (Lucent Dreaming, 2025), an anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled writers. Her work has been featured by the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Wales, BBC Radio 4, Country Living and more.
Richard Hooton won third prize in Lucent Dreaming’s 2020 Flash Fiction Competition with ‘X’. In 2023, ‘Underneath the Keyboard’ was published in the anthology Hope is the thing (Lucent Dreaming). Richard Hooton’s debut novel The Margaret Code is published by Sphere, an imprint of Little Brown. The voice-led whodunnit follows eighty-nine-year-old Margaret whose failing memory holds the key to the murder investigation taking place on her street. It will also be published in America by Union Square and Co, and in Germany by DTV. He is on Facebook, Instagram, X, and Bluesky as @RJHooton.
To order Cling Film direct from fellow Welsh publisher Seren Books, please visit: https://www.serenbooks.com/book/cling-film/
If you have previously published with Lucent Dreaming and would like to share your book news with us, please drop us a message!
Lucent Dreaming has been operating as a creative writing magazine since April 2018 from Cardiff. In 2023, we began our single-author trade publishing venture, launching
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