Skein Press – förlag

Why the moon travels is a haunting collection of twenty tales rooted in the oral tradition of the Irish Traveller community. Brave vixens, prophetic owls and stalwart horses live alongside the human characters as guides, protectors, friends and foes while spirits, giants and fairies blur the lines between this world and the otherworld. Collected by Oein DeBhairduin throughout his childhood, retold in his lyrical style, and beautifully illustrated by Leanne McDonagh.

In this unique collaboration, award-winning writers Deirdre Sullivan and Oein DeBhairduin and artist Yingge Xu explore their shared passion for storytelling, folklore and ritual. Encompassing eight stories inspired by the eight festivals in the wheel of the year, this book illuminates our experiences and traverses our fears, intertwining older threads with contemporary spaces.Designed by artist and bookbinder Éilís Murphy in a tête-bêche format, this unique and tactile book is exquisitely illustrated by Yingge Xu.

The Book of Trivialities, originally written in the poet’s native Arabic, is beautifully rendered into English by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid.Intricately fusing political and personal histories, these powerful lyric verses speak to the universal, undying quest for freedom that knows no borders or bounds. A profound, powerful sequence of verse from a poet who once lived through the heart of a revolution and now lives for the revolutionary heart of love.A unique bilingual book which reflects the collaborative and creative process of writers and translators working across cultures.

From award-winning author Oein DeBhairduin, Twiggy Woman is a collection of ghost stories rooted in the oral tradition of the Irish Traveller community. Like a flickering lamp, these eerie tales illuminate the threads between our mundane outer lives and the mysterious, wild and spooky visions of our inner worlds. With his lyrical prose and rich perspective, Oein guides us into the darker corners of the mind, always with the comfort of knowing that we won’t be left there. Featuring chilling black and white illustrations by celebrated artist Helena Grimes.

The first English translation of one of the most pivotal collections in contemporary Galician poetry, Whales and Whales navigates the urgent, playful, shapeshifting journey of a young woman affirming her place in the world. Caught between a father toiling far away in the icy waters of the Atlantic, and a mother who works in a canning factory, Luisa Castro’s ‘daughter of the sea’ casts her voice from her home on the North Galician coast. Throwing the romantic clichés of love, labour, girlhood and rural living overboard, Castro’s subtle sleight-of-hand — fluidly sung into English by Keith Payne — brings the innocent, irreverent desires of her emboldened protagonist to life. Disarmingly vulnerable and intensely liberating, these poems reveal the dreams and awakenings of a young girl becoming a woman in a society yet to learn how to accommodate her.

The Traveller families who live in Saint Rita’s are on borrowed time. In just a week they will be evicted by the local council, threatening not only their homes but also their history and the stories that have shaped them.Charlene, a proud young beoir suffers a humiliating betrayal. Her mother, Kate, is left to navigate unbearable loss while holding the family together. Her cousin, Sheena, strives to find her place in a new environment that is quick to dismiss her. Her uncle Tommy fights despair as his teenage son spirals out of control.As eviction day draws closer, the families struggle to preserve their dignity finding strength in one another as they navigate an unknown future. Unflinching, Contentious Spaces is a haunting story about identity and loyalty, shame and resilience, grief and love, and the defiant power of voices that refuse to be silenced.

Pulsing with the energy of urban life, these poems traverse the gritty, playful and tender moments that shape our lives. From the thrill of evading the police in ‘The Chase’ to the nostalgia of ‘New Shoes’ and the sheer abandon of ‘The Amusements’, we are pulled deep into a world where chaos and community intersect.With a clarion and uncompromising voice, Charles Lang maps a labyrinth of memories, blending sharp wit with darker undercurrents as he explores identity, masculinity, class and ecology. Whether reflecting on family, friendships or fleeting moments of euphoria, Lang offers an authentic snapshot of working-class lives, where beauty is found in both the mundane and the extraordinary; in the human and the more-than-human.A sonorous celebration of language and place, The Oasis is a vivid ode to the city’s streets and stories, a testament to resilience and belonging.

‘We were all to be queens with the smell of burning in our bodies. Now there’s nothing left for us but to be born again like the pelican, from a strange tongue …’What if it were the elders who lived on through story, while the youngest of the family was destined to die along with a vanishing world, making way for the vision of a new self?Throughout this award-winning collection rooted in rural Asturias, Raquel F. Menéndez inverts the generational roles of daughter, mother and great-grandmother, invoking the legendary figure of Shahrazad – the storyteller who spun tales against death – to reveal how the past is held within the present. Memory and forgetting, language and silence, home and exile collude and collide in these poems which ask how to live when so much feels already lost.This bilingual edition presents a newly revised Asturian text by Menéndez alongside an extraordinary translation into English by Robin Munby. The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad is a remarkable testament to what survives when voices fade, and to the intimate power of poetry to keep our histories, our languages, and our selves alive.

When Evgeny Shtorn flees the rising tide of homophobia and authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia, he leaves behind his home and the life he has spent years building. Arriving at a reception centre on the outskirts of Dublin, he discovers that his journey is far from over.Moving from one direct provision centre to the next, he chronicles the myriad characters he meets – dreamers, survivors, cynics, romantics, opportunists and idealists – all thrown together by circumstance and united by uncertainty. Through tender gestures, small cruelties, wry jokes and raw moments of vulnerability, a vivid portrait emerges; one of exile and dispossession, but also of humour, connection and friendship.As the banal violence of the system grinds him down, his profound morality, sense of identity, and reserves of empathy all begin to fray. In prose that is taut and utterly compulsive, Shtorn’s first-person chronicler draws us deep into his world, as we wait, dream, fear, fight and sometimes despair alongside him.Drawn from the diaries Shtorn kept throughout his asylum journey, in a nuanced and polyphonic translation by Alexandra Novitskaya, The Refugee Chronicles is a powerful account of human displacement in twenty-first-century Europe. Part fiction, part memoir, it lifts the veil on the patently absurd and fundamentally flawed system of Direct Provision – a world that is often discussed in the abstract but rarely narrated from within.