A special event with Rough Trade Books and Real Magic celebrating Independent Bookshop Week. Featuring talks with two very special guests, Babak Ganjei (On The Bus Without a Phone) and Owen Williams (Atrocity Exhibitions).

Babak Ganjei is an artist, musician and writer. For twelve years he hosted the show “Hot Mess” on NTS with his son. He has written and performed in the short films Waiting For Potato and Freelancer (Blink Productions). He once had a meeting with Netflix. In 2006 his band supported Silver Jews and he didn’t pluck up the courage to speak to David Berman but did watch him lift an amp into the van when loading out. He sent his first email from the Central Saint Martins library in 2001 and vowed the internet would never take off and has been playing catch up ever since. After a four year struggle he finally sold a set of twigs on Ebay for £82 in 2018. In 2024, he had his first major solo exhibition at The Bluecoat in Liverpool called Thanks For Having Me. Since then nobody has asked him to do any shows and so he has turned his hand to writing. On the Bus Without a Phone is his debut novel.

Taking place over the course of a bus journey en route to a first date, Babak Ganjei’s debut novel charts the seemingly infinite disappointments, misunderstandings and humiliations that have piled up over the course of narrator Bob Green’s life to date. Bob’s immediate circumstances, and the cast of characters with which he shares them, provide the imaginative jumping off point for digressions on teenage love, suburban ennui, pornography, race and identity, mobile phones, Converse, adult love, fatherhood, fast food, MF DOOM, the etiquette of bus seating and, perhaps most importantly of all, The Remains of the Day.

On the Bus Without A Phone is a dazzlingly intelligent, unashamedly comedic and ultimately moving work from a hugely original new writer. With his surrealist flair, world-weary melancholy and self-effacing humour, Ganjei is a Brautigan for the digital age.


Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld is a short sharp literary shock from acclaimed songwriter and musician Owen Williams. With blistering honesty, Williams examines the particular grief he feels in the wake of his mother’s suicide through the prism of a certain social media platform — ‘the Atrocity Exhibition'. Through the Exhibition's various galleries and spaces we come into contact with trauma-grift, ‘lolcows’, cruelty, paganism, Joan Didion and illness, de Sade and sexuality, and of course J.G. Ballard — all dissected with the deftest of prose touches and building into a frank accounting of the delusions and deceptions we all build so much of our selves from — both on and off - line.

Owen Williams is a musician and writer from Cardiff. He is the frontman of The Tubs, whose music has been featured in The New Yorker, the Guardian, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. His previous band, Joanna Gruesome, won the Welsh Music Prize. Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld is his first book.