The Braag CIC is a production company for literature and performance that supports underrepresented artists in the North East of England* We publish poetry and speculative fiction pamphlets, run the micro-journal Carmen et Error, and host occasional events including Poetry Murder Mysteries, Workshops and meet-ups.

We were established in October 2020 in a moment of dazzling common sense and against government advice to retrain as something practical—such as an umbrella, or an exceptionally short lamp post. 

2023-4 Publishing Schedule

Cover image for unfurl, a pale blue book cover with a textured paler swirl and the title Unfurl: Portrait of Another World

The great dials of Natural Philosophie may turn this way or that, but the supreme answer goes unpublished: Is Life inevitable under the correct conditions, or is it but fluke? And what pincer guides this realisation of Potential?

Enter an imaginative journey through the landscape and history of another world, and the curious beings who live there.

This chapbook, featuring vignettes, flash fiction, prose poems and short stories from Kym Deyn, Nathaniel Spain, and Finlay Worrallo, is a tour-de-force of speculative and experimental writing.

Sarah Westcott grew up in Devon, on the edge of Exmoor, and is particularly interested in writing about and through the natural world. She has published a pamphlet with Flipped Eye and two collections with Pavilion Poetry and is soon to begin a PhD in Zoopoetics at Birmingham University.

Pond by Sarah Westcott (Bloom, Slant Light) is a glimpse into another world, bright with dazzling language. Pond looks to the natural world with a keen eye, not just to capture it, but to write it into its own language. Ponds, rivers, and whales spin through this pamphlet, exploring something wet and complicated in the interaction between humans and the more-than-human, something that is sidled up to and, maybe, touched.

Poet and translator Nina Murray explores the life and myth of Larysa Kosach, the Ukrainian feminist thinker and poet known by her pen-name Lesya Ukrainka. With the richness of fairytale, Murray weaves a story following several generations, the women that carry them and the losses that follow them. These are poems about blood, homelands, and three miraculous thimbles.

Nina Murray is the author of the poetry collections Glapthorn Circular (LiveCanon Poetry, 2023) and Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) as well as several chapbooks.

Pond and Gannota: A Tale of Three Thimbles are forthcoming February 26th 2024.

Children gather birch-brush for my bed. Cradlewood. I lie naked in the cave, poppymilk bitter on my tongue.

A spiderwoman spins a swaddle-cloth, a shroud. A skein to lead me through the maze of dreams. I follow till she speaks a single word.

At sunrise I blink like a newborn. Lace my lop-stitched gown. Birds sing welcome—sister, daughter, bride—as I step into the light.”

In September 2024 we will be publishing Sarah Royston’s prose pamphlet (title TBC)!

Ask Asad Kably Vestergaard is half Danish, half Pakistani, and studied English with Creative Writing and the University of Aberdeen. They have been published sporadically in smaller magazines and online exhibits like Leopard Arts, Lucent Dreaming, and Re-Analogue.

Amelia K. lives in Georgia with her son. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Dirt, Cordite, ctrl+v, and others. Her website is bio.site/ameliak. 

Chloe Elliott is a writer based in York. She is a winner of the 2022 New Poets Prize for her pamphlet Encyclopaedia. She is also a Gold Winner of the 2020 Creative Future Writers’ Award. Her writing has featured in bath magg, Magma, The North, Poetry Birmingham and Strix, amongst others.

Liv Aldridge is a writer and poet from rural Sweden. She is pursuing a Literature degree in the North of England. Her poems have appeared in The Gentian and Carmen et Error and her reviews appear occasionally in NARC. 

Please subscribe to our mailing list to get infrequent updates about our publications, launches and submissions opportunities, as well as updates from our journal, Carmen et Error.

*Note: while we have a North Eastern outlook, fear not, we work with artists and writers from other geographic locations too!