I still can't quite believe I won a @BritFantasySoc award last weekend (you can see from this photo I was somewhat in shock at the news!). HUGE thanks to my publishers @NewConPress & @BlackShuckBooks, the judges, the BFS and the community of readers for all their support. 💗💖

If you're feeling the worries and noise of the world at the moment, I'm sending you this beautiful walk among the chestnut trees, the pale sun flickering through the leaves and falling in pools of light on the ground. The river is sparkling at the end of the lane, and all around the birds are singing out into the morning as the mist clears. I hope it brings a little Peak District calm to your day. 📍 Peak District, England

It's such a special moment when the light first hits. Standing in the early pre-dawn silence, you watch the sky get fractionally paler and paler, until the sun suddenly breaks cover over the hills with a sharp flash and runs down the slopes into the valley, bringing brightness to the trees and the river and the path ahead. It never gets old. 📍 Peak District, England

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.” – Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

Martin Lewis who died in obscurity in 1962 was a retired art teacher who found some success in his early career, but was largely forgotten. He spent his last three decades teaching other people how to etch, including Edward Hopper. History chose Hopper, but Lewis was his mentor.

Dark Ages | Call for Submissions 💥 After Rome falls, old gods stir, new faiths spread and forgotten things rise from the marshes. DEADLINE: 18th OCTOBER 2026‼️ flametr.com/4dbaEzx

When C.S. Lewis finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he realized something heartbreaking: the little girl he had written it for had grown up... Her name was Lucy Barfield: she was his goddaughter, the daughter of his close friend Owen Barfield, and she gave her name to the bravest child in Narnia, Lucy Pevensie. In May 1949, Lewis sent her the finished manuscript with a letter, and when the book came out the following year, that letter was printed on its first page. He told her he had written the story for her, but hadn’t realized that "girls grow quicker than books." By now, he admitted, "you are already too old for fairy tales." And then he made her a promise: "some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

Cancel your cosy evening. Ghost Lights has other plans. @markmorris10 flametr.com/4zfQInC

“I took a writing course in summer school in 1939, when I was in high school. But it didn’t work. The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for ten years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it. And along the way I wrote every day of every week of every month, for every year. And in ten years, I became a writer.” – Ray Bradbury

Thousands of tiny brushstrokes went into this autumn path, painted by the Danish artist Hans Andersen Brendekilde in 1902. The image below is in high definition, so zoom in and look at the leaves one by one... The path runs through a wood at the height of autumn, the trees turning gold and orange and red, and the ground so thickly covered in fallen leaves that you can almost hear them under your feet. A woman sits alone on a bench at the side of the path, while two figures walk away into the distance, and the whole scene glows with that soft, low light you only get on a clear afternoon at this time of year. The man who painted it was born Hans Andersen in 1857, into a poor family on the island of Funen, and as a boy he did chores on a farm. When he became a painter, there was another young artist working on the same kinds of subjects, also called Andersen, and people kept confusing them. So in 1884 the two friends solved the problem together: each took the name of the village he came from. Hans Andersen became Brendekilde, and his friend became L.A. Ring, one of the greatest Danish painters of his time. For much of his career, Brendekilde painted the harsh lives of Danish farmworkers, but as he grew older he turned more and more to the beauty of the countryside. This is one of those paintings: a quiet path, a bench, and the kind of autumn day that makes you want to sit down for a while and watch the leaves fall...

This painting is 117 years old. It looks like it could have been made yesterday, but this self-portrait by Zinaida Serebriakova was painted in 1909, when she was just twenty-four. That winter came early to her family’s estate of Neskuchnoye, in what is now Ukraine. Snow buried the garden and the fields, her husband was away on business, and the village girls who usually sat for her couldn’t get through the drifts. With no one else to paint, she sat down at her dressing table, picked up a brush, and painted the only model she had left: herself. She’s caught in the middle of combing her long dark hair, smiling as if she’s just thought of something funny. Scattered in front of her are the little things of an ordinary morning: perfume bottles, pins, a candle, a string of beads. And look closely at the candles and the way she holds the comb: she painted herself exactly as she appeared in the mirror, reversed, the way only she would have seen it. She never intended to show it to anyone. Her brother convinced her to send it to an exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1910, and it became the surprise of the season. The Tretyakov Gallery bought it straight away, and a young woman from a snowed-in country house was suddenly one of the most talked about painters in Russia. Within a few years, the world in this painting would be gone: the revolution came, the estate was plundered and burned, and she would spend most of her life in exile in Paris. But this one bright winter morning survived. Her uncle, the critic Alexandre Benois, saw it at that first exhibition and called it “the most joyous thing here.”

You know Gustav Klimt for the gold, but this is what he painted when no one was paying him... It's Birch Forest from 1903: slender white trunks rise like columns out of a forest floor burning with autumn color, rust and orange and brown, with little flecks of blue scattered through it, maybe sky caught in puddles after the rain. Get close and the whole thing breaks apart into tens of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, laid side by side like the tiles of a mosaic. Klimt painted it during his summers at the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian countryside, where he went every year with Emilie Flöge and her family to escape Vienna and the endless portrait commissions that had made him famous. He would hold a square of cardboard with a hole cut in the middle up to the landscape, like a camera, until he found the view he wanted, which is why so many of his landscapes are perfectly square. Those summers were so productive that landscapes ended up making up a quarter of all the paintings he ever finished. And this one has its own story: it belonged to the family of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and hung in the same Vienna home as her golden portrait, the Woman in Gold which I wrote about in one of my recent articles. In 2006, it was one of five Klimt paintings restituted to Adele’s niece after a long legal battle over works that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938. The gold is what made Klimt a legend, but the forests are where you get to meet the man...

Fang Chuxiong Chinese, born 1950

No one painted the blue hour like Peder Krøyer. This is Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach, and it shows two women, the painter Anna Ancher and Krøyer's wife Marie, walking arm in arm along the shore at the end of a summer day. It captures the blue hour, when the horizon almost dissolves into the evening mist and a scattered blue light is reflected in the sea. Krøyer loved that moment more than any other, describing the time of the evening when the two sources of natural light could be captured together as a particular favourite. The scene was real. It was inspired by a walk the two women took on the beach after a dinner party at the Krøyers' home in the summer of 1892, when the guests had gone down to the shore to enjoy the evening. And there was a secret behind it that no one discovered for almost a century: a 1990 exhibition revealed the painting had been based on photographs Krøyer took of the two women. After a month of studies, he wrote to friends that he finally began one beautiful morning, and "on the evening of the fourth day the picture was as it stands."

This is not a photograph. And when it was first shown in 1880, people were so sure it couldn't be just paint that they went looking behind the canvas for the lamp they thought was hidden there... It's called Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, by Arkhip Kuindzhi. The moon has just broken through a bank of clouds, and the river below catches its light in a greenish, silver sheen that seems to come from inside the water itself. The land around it has fallen into deep shadow, except for a few pale houses on the bank. Kuindzhi knew exactly what he had made, and he decided to show it completely alone, one painting in a darkened room with the windows covered. People queued to see it, and many coming back more than once. The Grand Duke who bought it loved it so much that he took it with him on a long sea voyage, and the story goes that the salt air and the bitumen in Kuindzhi's paints slowly darkened it. Imagine what it must have looked like in 1880, when it was new, in a dark room, lit by a single beam, with a crowd behind you convinced there had to be a trick…

Dark Ages | Call for Submissions 💥 After Rome falls, old gods stir, new faiths spread and forgotten things rise from the marshes. DEADLINE: 18th OCTOBER 2026‼️ flametr.com/4jtaPKf

"Don't you imagine the leaves dream now how comfortable it will be to touch the earth instead of the nothingness of the air and the endless freshets of wind?" - Mary Oliver And just like that, we tumble headlong into October. This month brings such a quiet perfection of colour to the Peak District countryside, the leaves softening with every shade of yellow and orange and gold, yet still with those last greens bravely shining on. I hope it's a wonderful time for us all. This scene in Beresford Dale is the photograph that will bring a little beauty to your wall all month if you managed to snap up a copy of my 2026 Peak District Calendar. If you would like a copy of my 2027 Calendar for only £10.95, please pop to my website (link in bio) or see the link in the comments. Thank you! 📍 Peak District, England

Dark Ages | Call for Submissions 💥 After Rome falls, old gods stir, new faiths spread and forgotten things rise from the marshes. DEADLINE: 18th OCTOBER 2026‼️ flametr.com/4dHEY4Q

Claude Monet is said to have called him "the master of light" and in 1909 he was one of the most celebrated painters in the world. Today, outside his own country, most people have never heard his name... He was Joaquín Sorolla, and that year he arrived in New York for his first American exhibition. The city fell for him completely: of the 356 paintings on show, 195 sold. He stayed five months and painted the President of the United States. Then he went home to the sea he grew up beside, and that summer, on the beach at Valencia, he painted this. He first called it The White Horse. A boy leads the animal out of the water, both still streaming wet, the sun running along the boy's bare shoulder and the horse's flank, then breaking across the shallows until the sand shines like glass. The canvas is over two meters wide, and up close the brushstrokes look fast, loose, almost careless. Step back, and they turn into some of the most convincing sunlight ever put into paint. Eleven years later, working in his garden, he had a stroke and never painted again. He died in 1923. By then the art world had moved on to Modernism, and beauty like this had started to look old-fashioned. Within a generation, the master of light had slipped into the shadows...

Sand (magnified x300)

Just a few of the book benches we have been to so far as part of @brightonstorytrail Grab a book and find a bench to sit and read on. #epoquepress #bookcommunity #books