Salt to publish a new short story collection by Stewkey Blues author D J Taylor

Salt Publishing has snapped up D J Taylor’s new short story collection, Poppyland.

Director Christopher Hamilton-Emery acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown, and the book will be published as a paperback original on 15th July 2025.

Poppyland is Taylor’s second volume of short stories about Norfolk, moving on from Stewkey Blues (Salt), which won in the fiction category at the East Anglian Book Awards.

"The collection offers more reportage from his native Norfolk, bringing together a succession of characters who are ordinary, put-upon and irrevocably tethered to the landscapes that shape them," the synopsis says. "Most of the people in Poppyland are watching their lives begin to blur at the margins. From small-hours taxi offices, out-of-season holiday estates and flyblown market stalls, they sit observing an environment that seems to be moving steadily out of kilter, struggling to find agency, making compromises with a world that threatens to undermine them, and sometimes—but only sometimes—taking a decisive step that will change their destinies."

Taylor said: “I’m delighted that Salt will be publishing Poppyland after the terrific job they made of Stewkey Blues. Even more than the previous collection, it’s an attempt to explore the ‘otherness’ of my native Norfolk from the angle of the people who live there and the passage migrants trying to negotiate their way around its very complex protocols.”

Hamilton-Emery added: "It’s wonderful to be working with David again—his mastery of the short story form is matched by his uncanny ear for Norfolk dialect and cadence. But most of all, he has the unerring knack of revealing the weight and nous and fragility of lives lived in this big ancient rural county."

Taylor’s fiction includes English Settlement (Vintage), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd) and Derby Day (Vintage), both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He has also written many works of non-fiction, among them Orwell: The Life (Vintage), which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, and Orwell: The New Life (Constable). He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Taylor lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.