Sean Ashton

Sean Ashton is interested in constraints. The novel Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque, 2017) is the memoir of a man who can only construct sentences in the negative, and can therefore only tell us what he has never done. The novel The Way to Work (Salt, 2023) relates the tale of a man who boards his morning train only to find himself in a locomotive equivalent of Purgatory: a vehicle of apparently infinite length on which he is now to reside for eternity. Sampler (Valley Press, 2020) is a poetry collection presented as a selection of ‘entries’ from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets. Ashton’s first book, Sunsets (Alma Books, 2007), is a collection of reviews of imaginary artworks and other cultural phenomena.

Ashton’s interest in constraints is somewhat disingenuous, since all art is about constraint. But his writing is certainly more constrained than most, extending from the imposition of epistemological structures (as with Sampler) to rigid grammar and rhetoric that restricts what is sayable (as with Living in a Land). These concerns affect all his writing, even this statement, which, though written by Ashton, has been made to sound like it’s been written by someone else.

Sean Ashton is an Associate Editor of the print and online journal Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History. Ashton was the inaugural writer in residence for this publication, contributing a vinyl LP (and online) recording of his novel Living in a Land to the first issue in 2020.

IAAC International Awards for Art Criticism (runner-up), 2017-18

Jungle Kisses (novel, 2024- )

Ashton’s current novel Jungle Kisses concerns the fortunes of a literary scholar who invokes the spirit of Charlotte Brontë. Charlotte becomes his intellectual Governess in his new role teaching creative writing at an independent university in Norfolk run by a Vice-Chancellor with Down’s Syndrome and a charismatic non-binary professor named Mallard Drake. This institution is less a university than a vehicle for social change, a Black Mountain College for the 21st century. The novel will appear in 2025 or 2026.

Ashton, S. (2023) The Way to Work. Sheffield: Salt Publications.

Ashton, S. (2020) Sampler. Scarborough: Valley Press.

Ashton, S. (2020). Living in a Land. Vinyl LP and download, excerpts from novel Living in a Land (distributed with Issue 1 of the journal Inscription, eds. Adam Smyth, Gill Partington, Simon Morris; York: Information as Material).

Ashton, S. (2017) Living in a Land. London: Ma Bibliothèque.

Ashton, S. (2007). Sunsets. London: Alma Books