Nell Osborne (Ghost Driver) in conversation with Neil Griffiths

Tickets for talks and panels are only available to Indie Press Fair ticket holders. BOOK HERE

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Malory walks home after an ordinarily gruelling night out, having escaped the company of her associates. Something ripples in the darkness. The shape of a figure. So begins a chain of events with the texture of dream plasma. A story of persecution mania. Professional ignominy. A sudden disappearance. The terror of seeing oneself too clearly...

Part horror story, part tragicomic nightmare, Ghost Driver is a slim shudder of a novel about a woman who has taken every wrong turn available to her.

Ghost Driver (MOIST, 2025) is the joint winner of the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize. Join Nell Osborne and Neil Griffiths for a conversation about this 'shape-shifting gem' of a novel (judge Stu Hennigan).

Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of experimental women’s writing. From 2018–20, she co-ran the Manchester-based reading series No Matter, commissioning new work from writers including Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson. She completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Manchester on experimental women writers, including Ann Quin and Kathy Acker, and co-edited Gestures: a body of work, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice (2025). Her poetry pamphlet Thank You For Everything was published by Monitor Books in 2024, and another pamphlet, Seances Near Me, is forthcoming from Spite Press in 2027. Her debut novel, Ghost Driver (Moist Books, 2025), jointly won the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize in 2026; Daisy LaFarge described it as “addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar”. She is currently working on her next novel.

Neil Griffiths is a novelist, publisher and founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses. His first novel, Betrayal in Naples, won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award; Saving Caravaggio was shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award (2007). His third novel As a God Might Be was published by Dodo Ink. His memoir The Wrong Son was published this year to critical acclaim.

Location details

Manor House Library, 34 Old Road, Lee, London SE13 5SY (London Borough of Lewisham).

Ten minutes' walk from Hither Green Station, fourteen minutes from Blackheath Station. The DLR runs to Lewisham, approximately 20 minutes' walk away, and is serviced well by taxis and numerous bus routes to within less than 400 yards of the venue.

Manor House Library is an eighteenth-century Grade II* listed building set in the award-winning Manor House Gardens park. We have level entrance access throughout, with ample toilet facilities. We will be operating a pay bar throughout the day serving a selection of wines, beers and soft drinks. The event spaces where talks are held and the bar operates are air conditioned, and the ornate ceilings in the library itself sit alongside works of twenty-first century art from the Calico Collection and paintings of the Baring family, who once occupied the house and were known as "the sixth great European power," facilitating the Louisiana Purchase. A library for over a hundred years, Manor House now attracts over 250,000 visits a year.

There is a car park to the front of the library, but spaces are limited. Parking on the roads around Manor House and the park is free of charge on Sundays.

Calico Projects operates four libraries in Lewisham and numerous other arts and community venues. It is a registered charity (number 1180229).