Join us for a celebration of The Indigo Hours, the ambient novella from the indie press Broken Sleep Books.

There will be readings of poetry and prose from Maria Sledmere and Leo Bussi followed by a conversation and Q&A. Topics to discuss may include art & music writing, ambient literature, auto-theory/fiction, homage, love, everydayness, plotting the situationship and more. Books will be available from both authors.

Maria Sledmere is a poet-scholar and senior lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. Her most recent publications are Languishing, cute - with Ian Macartney (Tapsalteerie, 2025), Midsummer Song (Tenement Press, 2024) and Cinders (Krupskaya, 2024). Her work has been shortlisted for the ASLE-uki Critical Book Prize 2025 and the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2022.

Leo Bussi is a poet. He runs Waterwings, a poetry reading series based in Glasgow, has published Life-Sized (SPAM, 2024) and curated EK, a symposium on Ekphrasis.

About the book

The Indigo Hours by Maria Sledmere is an immersive, radiant text that moves between autofiction, essay, and poetic prose to document the textures of contemporary longing. Centred around a seasonal arc and filtered through the ambient melancholia of late capitalism, the work refracts emotional experience through media, memory, pop culture, and shifting landscapes-from Berlin pools to prairie towns, from night buses to art galleries. Sledmere's sentences are lush, recursive, and sensorily attuned, sustaining a rhythmic, diaristic lyricism that continually folds the personal into the atmospheric. What emerges is a powerful reckoning with intimacy, grief, and temporality at the edges of digital and embodied life.

If you can't make the event, you can order Maria's book from the publisher here.

Accessibliity

Entry to the gallery is via an accessible entrance. There is an accessible toilet.