Goodlord with Ella Frears

Event information

We are honoured to be hosting an evening with Ella Frears at Real Magic, celebrating her fierce, dark, funny and unique novel-in-verse, Goodlord.

Through a series of increasingly excoriating emails to her estate agent Ava, our narrator lets out her mounting rage against the maddening and many indignities of her present situation.

She tells Ava about the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still; about her underpaid exploitative jobs; about an artists residency that offers her the space she craves - but demands a complicated transaction in return. She describes the exhausting work of trying to navigate a world where landlords lay claim to her pay checks and men lay claim her body. All she wants is a home, a place of safety and control - but each step forward is met with relentless setbacks.

Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.

'A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny' OBSERVER

‘A dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read' TELEGRAPH

'It's Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground reimagined for the renting generation’ DAZED

Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. In 2022, Ella was named first ever Poet in Residence for the Dartington Trust's grade II listed Gardens, selected by Alice Oswald. Ella has had poetry published in the London Review of Books, the Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Telegraph and more. She is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow for the Courtauld Institute of Art.