Rue Baldry and Angharad Hampshire for Nice Things

Rue Baldry is a York-based writer. She has a Creative Writing MA from Leeds University, was a Bridge Awards/Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer, a Jerwood/Arvon mentee, and a Women’s Prize Discoveries longlistee.

Her debut novel, Dwell, won the 2024 First Novel Prize and was published in 2026. Rue’s short stories have appeared in journals such as Granta, Fairlight Shorts, Ambit, Litro, Mslexia, and The Honest Ulsterman. In 2023 her story, Lech Prince, and the Nice Things, won the Canada and Europe region of the Commonwealth Prize. Other stories have been longlisted for the BBC NSSA.

Rue will be in conversation with Angharad Hampshire, lecturer in creative writing at York St John University and author of The Mare, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Rue joins us for Nice Things, a collection of stories traversing identity, sexuality, and human connection across the industrial towns and satellite villages of Northern England.

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Nice Things challenges readers to confront their own assumptions about belonging, propriety, and the invisible boundaries that divide us.

Opening with the Commonwealth Prize-winning "Lech, Prince, and the Nice Things," the collection weaves through teenage sexual awakening, family secrets, and post-pandemic isolation. Characters grapple with class divisions, discrimination, and desires they barely understand themselves. Unflinching and deeply human, these stories capture pivotal moments when lives quietly but irrevocably change course.