‘Undercurrents’ (Broken Sleep Books, 2025)

​Richard Skinner’s Undercurrents is a hybrid essay collection that brings together literary criticism, memoir, cultural commentary, and music writing in a loose, associative structure. Moving from Proust’s memory theory to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, from Renaissance nuns to Eisenstein’s montage, Skinner’s prose is expansive yet precise, attuned to the connective tissue between art forms, ideas, and personal experience. The voice is intimate but critically rigorous, allowing space for reverie, close reading, and autobiographical fragments. The result is a rich, idiosyncratic meditation on narrative, perception, and the patterns that shape a creative life.

‘I’m thoroughly enjoying Richard Skinner’s latest hybrid essay collection Undercurrents from Broken Sleep Books. Opening my mind to different ways of appreciating different art forms and also given me a vital reading list. I love the clarity and sharpness of each essay. Very accessible and in no way pretentious, it has re-enthused me to not only engage with other artists but to push my own practice. That’s what reading at its best can do.’
— Lisa Kelly, author of A Map Towards Fluency

‘This essay book was really good. If you’re into contemporary music, culture, art and literature this is for you.’
​— Roger Robinson, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize

‘What a breath of fresh air this slim volume is: a collection of uncompromisingly thought-provoking essays, and the variety of topics so stimulating. It feels like listening to a friend talking about subjects that deeply matter to him but that are also universal, and that he handles as only someone both knowledgeable and passionate about them can. Richard Skinner is an author of literary fiction, life-writing, essays, non-fiction and poetry, and a highly regarded creative-writing tutor. In Undercurrents, he brings together essays about books, the writing craft, films and music, his own life experiences, as well as interviews with poets. Naturally, the tone varies as a function of each essay’s topic: from the more analytical one for a review, to the reflective and intense one about two beloved friends’ deaths. Skinner’s thoughts on the link between Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ principle and making connections in one’s writing intrigued me. I enjoyed the expansiveness with which an essay about Talking Heads’ Remain in Light takes in Isiah Berlin, Marcel Proust and the ancient Greek chorus. The description of the state of ‘self-emptying’ and ‘belonging’ to the landscape while on a long hike resonated. The reflections on friendship, death, and acceptance of the unknowable, with regard to the death of dear friends, were relatable and made me think. This is a rare gem in the current publishing landscape. All credit to the author, and to Broken Sleep Books for its ambitious publishing programme.’
​— Valeria Vascina, author of That Summer in Puglia

‘A collection of essays and reviews that evidence Skinner’s own creative processes and influences as he comments upon the structure and constitution of various albums, books and films and his responses to them, before two examples of life writing, one an exquisite elegy that manages to be both biographical and autobiographical at the same time, and then a previously published interview with Skinner, and Skinner’s own conversational interview with the poet David Harsent. I know Skinner mostly through his poetry and it’s good to see his own take on books by Proust, Cortázar, Didsbury and Davie, and albums by Talking Heads, Robert Palmer, Laika, Holger Czukay, R.E.M. and David Sylvian and find out not only what he makes of them but how they (and many others which are new to me) feed into – literally in the case of the texts considered – his own writing. I’m looking forward to the result of Skinner’s intention to ‘try my hand at some “fractal” poems.’’ 
— Rupert Loydell, International Times

You can order your copy here.