London Lies

Moving from 1930s Camden to a Royal Wedding "riot", via football fights, office steeplechases and awkward dates in art galleries, London Lies is a bizarre, funny, moving and sometimes unnerving glimpse into the secret life of the city we all love and know.



Featuring nineteen writers and twenty-three stories showcased at award-winning monthly live literature event, London's Liars' League.



Joan Taylor-Rowan is a former teacher of Art and Textiles, and world traveller. She is the author of The Birdskin Shoes, a tale of circuses and earthquakes in Mexico. She has had several stories read on Radio 4 and performed at Short Fuse, Storytales, Liars' League and Tales of the Decongested. She has also written the book and lyrics for a musical based on her own short story, Kandy Kottage. Joan now rund a writing group in Hastings.

Liam Hogan was abandoned in a library at the tender age of 3, only to emerge blinking into the sunlight many years later, with a head full of words and an aversion to loud noises.

He's a Liar and co-host of the award winning monthly literary event, Liars' League, and winner of Quantum Shorts 2015 and Sci-Fest LA's Roswell Award 2016. His steampunk stories appear in Leap Books 'Beware the Little White Rabbit' #Alice150 anthology, in Flame Tree Publishing's 'Swords&Steam', and in Steampunk Trails II. Science fiction stories appear in DailyScienceFiction, in Sci-Phi Journal, and in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.

He lives in London, tweets at @LiamJHogan and dreams in Dewey Decimals.

We published Liam's first collection of short stories, Happy Ending NOT Guaranteed in April 2017

Rosalind Stopps lives and works in South East London, which provides endless inspiration. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University and is currently working on her third novel.



Rosalind's story for London Lies, The Suitcase was originally read at Liars' League in April 2009 as part of the Bridge & Tunnel evening.She has two stories in Stations: How to Grow Old in Brockley is set in Brockley and pays homage to that classic tale of Love and Trains: Brief Encounter.



Recipes for a Successful Working Life is set at Norwood Junction and is a tale of work-place bullying and pizza ovens.



and two stories in Lovers' Lies, How to Survive the Olympics with a Broken Heart, and Monsieur Fromage.



There's the frustrations of dating at the Renoir, finding inspiration on the tube, getting drunk and rejected by the city and many other snippets of capital life. Some are tangentially related, some could only take place here. Some end on a punchline, some on a sucker punch, and the one about an elderly lady after the apocalypse nearly had us snivelling on a commuter train.