We are very pleased to welcome writer and painter Chris Wilson  to the top of the hill for a reading from his new book of stories The Glue Ponys.

Chris Wilson was born in 1961 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and grew up in Dar es Salaam, East Africa. He moved with his parents to California in 1971. After many years of living in the streets and prisons of the USA, he was extradited to the UK in 1998. Since becoming drug and crime free in 2001, he has studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, where he was awarded a First with Distinction. His paintings have been exhibited across the UK and his first book, Horse Latitudes, was published in 2013. He currently lives in London.

“When lieutenant Teddy Malovich finally died they left him in the bed for a week and then put his body inside some black plastic trashcan liners, wrapped it up with duct tape and put him in the hallway closet.”

So begins the opening story in this startling first collection by author/painter Chris Wilson. Thirty tales about, as the author himself puts it, ‘the lost and the wandering of America.’ The settings: prison yards, sidewalks, alleyways, hospital wards, rusting cars, woodlands, deserted houses, miracle beaches, truck stops, penthouse apartments. The cast: junkies, hookers, hustlers, cellmates, bi-sexual transexuals, glue ponys, anorexic pornstars, runaways, the innocent, the wounded – and heroin, always heroin…

“Like his art, it’s not all pretty, but it’s real and it’s all his own — and it’ll stay with you a good, long time.” Empty Mirror Books