Welcome to the Ridge
London Book Fair 2026 – human readers, unite!
In the mayhem of the London Book Fair, one thing was clear. Human readers want books written by other humans, and they want to read them together. Publishers can now mark their works as Human Authored as part of a Society of Authors initiative. Mock-up books and a mock-up crime scene told generative AI companies,…
Alphabetical diaries
Worried about productivity? Planning to get that book finished by doing a daily six impossible pages before breakfast? Don’t. Sheila Heti took ten years to write 165 pages. Ironic to readers from this corner of the globe, given that “heti” in Finnish means “at once”. Heti boiled her journals down and rearranged them in alphabetical…
Write a year together
Kirjoita vuosi (“Write a year”, Art House 2025) edited by Sinikka Vuola and Päivi Koivisto, is an accessible guide for writers. If you’d like to extend the depth and range of your writing skills and want help to commit to writing regularly, this could be the book for you. It is like a writing course…
Happy new writing! Join us in 2026
Happy new writing year! How far in advance do you block out writing time? I plan my retreats for the whole next year at the end of the one before. There might be more to come, as I am testing a new venue in January, but every couple of months, we have a couple of…
Your application, your human reader
Recently I learned that a university had proposed using an AI chatbot to write research funding applications. The writers would have to check whether the bot had hallucinated the guidelines. This led to flurry on social media. Some scholars saw it as a cynical cost-cutting, productivity-boosting exercise. What I don’t know is whether the bots…
Cover image: the ridge/harju in Jyväskylä. All photos (c) Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
Ridge Writing Retreats 