Category: Press

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One of my first jobs in television was being a junior partner in a TV company with Esther Rantzen and London property magnates, the Bloom brothers. We were an unlikely quartet and for a while I became a regular fixture in her kitchen. Esther was magic to be around. Witty, wise, brave, mischievous and kind, a fearless champion of the most vulnerable right up to the end, when she campaigned to change the law on assisted dying. My heart goes out to Rebecca and the rest of the family. Fly free, E! ❤️


Esther and I on a series for Channel 4 about the Centre for Social Justice Awards

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Peter Lilly just became the first (but not the last….) POET to brave The Writers Gauntlet with Sadie Kaye! The Hooghly Review just nominated his poetry Best of The Net. Luckily, you don’t need an MFA to appreciate his razor wit….

Discover why his poetry DESTROYS modernist empiricism with FACTS AND SCIENCE and other pretentious stuff!

https://thehooghlyreview.com/sadie-kaye-vs-peter-lilly/

https://hongkongbuzz.hk/2026/10/the-battle-of-the-wits-sadie-kaye-versus-peter-lilly

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Volume 6 of Peel Street Poetry‘s zine Tentacle launches TOMORROW (30 Sept) at Social Room, 74-78 Stanley Street, Central from 8pm-11pm. Two of my ‘poems’ are hiding inside. (I only found out yesterday!) I was in the zine’s Future Expression issue. The theme for this issue was ‘Form’. My links to it were extremely tenuous and probably ungrammatical. Hope to see you there!

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Following on from my conversation with poet, humanitarian and Afghan women’s rights advocate Shikha S Lamba that was published this week in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, I wrote a short news piece for BUZZ on Shikha’s latest initiatives and how you can help! Thanks to BUZZ editor Robin Bradbeer for publishing.

https://hongkongbuzz.hk/2026/09/from-poetry-to-action-shikha-s-lamba-lights-the-way

You can read our conversation in Cha, Challenging the Patriarchy with Poetry & Prose here: https://chajournal.com/2026/09/19/shikha-s-lamba

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The Writer’s Gauntlet returns with witty historical fiction novelist Emma Pei Yin. Her debut novel, When Sleeping Women Wake, won the 2026 Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction. Find out why archivists hate her, government watchlists hate her and knights fear her!

I met Emma at a Hong Kong literary festival event last year, where we teamed up for a literary quiz, put our heads together, and managed to come up with not a single correct answer between us, which is actually a lot trickier than it sounds…

https://thehooghlyreview.com/sadie-kaye-vs-emma-pei-yin

https://hongkongbuzz.hk/2026/09/battle-of-the-wits-sadie-kaye-versus-emma-pei-yin

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BUZZ have just reprinted my conversation about Art, Memoir and The Books that Read Us with the amazing Holly Sykes that was first published by The Hooghly Review. Thanks to editor Robin Bradbeer for championing not just me but the writers and artists I am fortunate enough to work with and champion. Buzz and The Hooghly Review have reciprocal arrangement where Buzz reprint The Writer’s Gauntlet as Battle of The Wits within 48 hours of The Hooghly Review publishing it.

https://hongkongbuzz.hk/2026/09/judging-books-judging-us-art-memoir-and-the-books-that-read-us-sadie-kaye-and-holly-sykes-go-beyond-the-book-cover

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I’m spending more time conversing with Holly Sykes than her husband these days! This conversation, just published by The Hooghly Review, is called Judging Books Judging Us – Art, Memoir, And The Books That Read Us. It was inspired by Holly’s substack, Beyond the Book Cover firing rockets into my neurodivergent brain and getting me unhealthily fixated on the concept of books reading us. There is treatment, according to my psychiatrist, but it’ll cost me…

https://thehooghlyreview.com/sadie-kaye-and-holly-sykes-go-beyond-the-book-cover/

My other conversation with Holly about mapping loss and loneliness in a crowded city was one of two columns published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal on Saturday and can be found here.

The Writer’s Gauntlet will be back in The Hooghly Review on Thursday (with a Friday reprint in Buzz.) Who will be the latest intrepid writer to brave my Gauntlet? This gets harder and harder to decide as there are now a mind-boggling number of subs to choose from!

Thanks to Ankit, co-editor of The Hooghly Review, for the kind comment on X.

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The second of my conversations with writers and artists to be published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal last weekend was with irrepressible Afghan women’s rights advocate and poet Shikha S Lamba. She recently curated a powerful poetry collection to raise the voices of Afghan women in collaboration with The Candyman’s Trumpet.

Shikha credits Afghan-American author Nadia Hashimi (who recently braved my Writer’s Gauntlet) as the source of her literary inspiration. Thanks to Cha’s wondrous editor-in-chief Tammy Lai-Ming Ho for the double coverage!

https://chajournal.com/2026/09/19/shikha-s-lamba

https://chajournal.com/category/sadie-kaye

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My conversation with writer Holly Sykes was the first of two columns to be published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal last weekend. Holly talks with insight and charm about how it feels to map loss and loneliness in a crowded city – and how loss overlaps with connection.

The story is illustrated with art and photography by Kasra Shroff, Rebecca Dandridge-Walker and Ricky Sadiosa. Thanks, as ever, to editor Tammy Lai-Ming Ho for the care and attention you put into each piece.

https://chajournal.com/2026/09/19/holly-sykes

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Bestselling author Nadia Hashimi is the latest intrepid writer to brave my Writer’s Gauntlet. For once though, you won’t need a box of tissues. She’s witterific! Her take-down of the patriarchy aptly coincided with the news feminist icon Gloria Steinem had passed. (RIP) It’s Nads!!!

https://thehooghlyreview.com/sadie-kaye-vs-nadia-hashimi

https://hongkongbuzz.hk/2026/09/battle-of-the-wits-sadie-kaye-versus-nadia-hashimi

Nadia on Goodreads

Nadia’s website