HEAT 18 offers writing from Lena Andersson (trans. Sarah Death), .O., Fiona Kelly McGregor, Leah Muddle, Debbie Lim and Hannah Fink.
Our first issue of 2025 starts with 'Annie', a story translated by Sarah Death from Swedish novelist Lena Andersson, whose fiction contains some of the clearest, most truthful and cutting, hilarious and crushing representations of the minutiae of human relations I have read. It then turns to .O., whose poem-portraits of Fitzroy pulverise the heart by seeing too deeply and with too much experience. Fiona Kelly McGregor's virtuoso essay 'What's in a Name?' looks at the violence and freedom of given names and chosen names by transcribing a chorus of personal name-stories from all corners of the world. Leah Muddle's buoyant 'Volcane Sequence' of poems sets the heroine of Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli against the artist's eternal battle with herself we are horrified by, and throw ourselves at, a volcano who will only spout when it wants. Debbie Lim's weather poems likewise draw out the mist and rain and thunderous turmoil in our hermetic interiors. Finally, in 'Charismatic', Hannah Fink takes us through Lucian Freud's art and life to reveal endless layers in both the paintings and the man.
When the new third series of HEAT was launched in physical form at the start of 2022, the world was just emerging from the worst of the pandemic, and our emphasis was on sending copies of HEAT directly into people's homes. The accompanying design was deliberately minimal, in acknowledgement of readers who already had some familiarity with the magazine and its reputation. The cover of this issue, also designed by Jenny Grigg, is for a more open world, where a new reader can come across it on a shelf in a bookshop, lying on an armchair in the home of a friend. Our hope is that you will be welcomed in by its generous title and the writers' own words, and find what you've been looking for inside: writing that appeals to our interest in innovative and adventurous forms, and unfamiliar subjects, writing that asks something of us, gives something to us, and pushes us further into life.
