The Book Club Boutique presents Show Me the Sky May 25, 2009

What: Great music, good company - if you attend!! - and a little reading to celebrate the paperback publication of Show Me The Sky

Featuring: Guest readers Salena Godden, Vanessa Gebbie, Nikesh Shukla and Simone Felice

Nicholas Hogg was born in Leicester, UK in 1974. After graduating from the University of East London with a psychology degree, he travelled widely, living in Japan, Fiji and the United States. In 2005, he was named winner of the £5,000 New Writing Ventures prize for fiction, and of the inaugural £5,000 New Writing Ventures award for fiction, with Zen — as covered by the Guardian Online, and The Tokyo Catfish, a love story set in the aftermath of a Tokyo earthquake, was a prizewinner in the London Writers contest. In 2007, Paradise, which follows two stowaway children from the tarmac of Mombassa airport to the 2012 London Olympics, earned runner up honours in the 2007 Willsden Herald Short Story competition, adjudicated by Zadie Smith. An anthology of the winning stories, Willsden Herald: New Short Stories 1, is available from Amazon.co.uk. His first novel, Show Me the Sky, was published in 2008. Nicholas Hogg is currently working on a second novel and a collection of short stories.

Salena Godden's short stories and poetry can be found published in various magazines including Drawbridge; Rising; The Illustrated Ape; Nude Magazine; Salzburg Review; Trespass; The Gay Times; Le Gun; Litro; The Guardian; The Camden New Journal & Plectrum. Her work has also featured in many anthologies; Penguin’s IC3; Canongate’s Fire People; Serpents Tail’s Croatian Nights; Hodder & Stoughton’s Oral & Dedalus The Decadent Handbook. This spring, 2009, her writing will appear in two brand new anthologies; Punk Fiction & Dwang, alongside the likes of Dan Fante, Cathi Unsworth & Billy Childish among a great many others. HarperCollins / HarperPress won the auction for her debut childhood memoir Springfield Road to be published in hardback in spring 2010.

Vanessa Gebbie is a writer, editor and writing teacher whose short fiction has won many awards. She is widely published online and in print. Her debut collection Words from a Glass Bubble was published in 2008 by Salt Modern Fiction and will be following by a second collection Ed's Wife and other Creatures in late 2009. She is currently writing a novel and is commissioning editor for a text book on writing short fiction.

Simone Felice is the author of two novellas, GOODBYE, AMELIA and HAIL MARY FULL OF HOLES, and numerous short stories, poems and songs. He is a founding member of The Felice Brothers and his new band The Duke & King makes its UK debut on May 26th at London 's Bush Hall. He is at work on a new novel, BLACK JESUS. He lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

Nikesh Shukla is a writer, rapper and Saved By the Bell enthusiast caught between the cityscapes of Bombay and the green and pleasant land of London . His writing has been featured on BBC2, Radio 1 and 4, Resonance fm, Tell Tales and he has performed at Apples and Snakes, Soho Theatre and Glastonbury in his quest to destroy the perfect metaphor. He recently completed his first collection of short stories, I’ve Forgotten My Mantra, and records under the name Yam Boy, and with the group The D’Archetypes.