Book Launch: BARABUS by SJ Fowler (5th June)

In BARABUS, a medic roams an English city going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error — minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis- / adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine.

In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning — the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.

If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris—the acerbity of Peter Weiss—and the ambiguity of Le Clezio, Fowler’s second novella is a work of disarming directness. A paean to the costs of a life lived in service of the needs of others, this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity.

Everything that folds from Fowler’s soft bag of brain is a phenomenal and precious gift, and one anyone truly interested in language, human coping and the murk-sparks of the mind should know.

—Han Smith

Frenetic and exhilarating outbursts, as eye-witness accounts from a mind’s eye of true originality. Harnessing a sublime gift-of-the-gab, Fowler—garbed as a healthcare professional—rushes headlong into a world full of genuine trepidation and make-believe. Convincingly performative and harrowingly memorable with great tracts that remain branded-on-the-brain long after the event, he digs breathlessly into episodes of hardcore mundanity as if he/we were actually there.

—Andrew Kötting

Fowler’s BARABUS is relentless, compelling, comic and sobering.

—Vanessa Onwuemezi

SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and performer living in London. His collections include I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020), The Great Apes (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and The Parts of the Body that Stink (Hesterglock, 2024). His work has become known for its exploration of the potential of poetry, alongside collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and improvised talking performances. He has been commissioned by institutions such as the National Gallery, Tate Modern, Wellcome Collection and Southbank Centre, and he has presented his work at over fifty international festivals, including Hay Xalapa, Mexico; Dhaka Lit Fest; Hay Arequipa, Peru; and the Niniti Festival, Iraq. Fowler was nominated for the Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018). In 2022, Tenement Press published MUEUM, Fowler’s debut novella, which was shortlisted for the 2022/2023 edition of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His literary criticism has appeared in the London Review of Books, Poetry London, and Times Literary Supplement. He is a Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Cain (2106) was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Notes on the Sonnets, an anarchic response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. His first novel, The Transition, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. His seventh poetry collection, The Book of Jonah, was published by Picador in 2025, and his most recent novel—Black Bag—was published by John Murray, 2026.

Event Venue

Brick Lane Bookshop, 166 Brick Lane, London, United Kingdom

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