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I write and have written about, in no particular order: the etymology of eating and drinking words, the history of molokhia, the facsimiles of Emily Dickinson, the inherent tragedy of Mariah Carey’s Butterfly (1996), the British coastline, and jazz music.

My work appears or is upcoming in publications including Vittles, Line of Best Fit, Port and Paste, where I am a staff writer.

i.

Selected Essays and Criticism

in print and online

“Medium Build is trying to get better”
Paste

(September 2026)Nick Carpenter planned to call me from his car. “I have such a bad rap of taking Zoom calls in totally fucked places,” he confesses, before walking me through a play-by-play of the hour leading up to our conversation: feeling guilty for living up to his calls-on-the-go reputation as he sat in his car, about to call; realizing his phone was about to die; sprinting to his record label’s office and plugging his phone in there just in time to hop on our Zoom. Plus, he says, he was trying to be better. This is the first, but not the last, story of its kind from Carpenter, better known as Medium Build. He has a knack for telling a tale, a little like the ones the loud, funny guys at a party might tell at college. But what really binds his stories together are their endings: their narrator is always trying to get better.

“On Spontaneous Music Live, SML stakes its claim as one of America’s best bands“
Paste

(June 2026)Mike Rutherford once described being in a band as the ultimate state of compromise. “What you lose in compromise, you gain in collaboration,” he said. The greatest achievement of the Los Angeles quintet SML is making you forget that compromise exists. It isn’t necessary because Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann function as a single unit. In this respect, they may very well be the best band playing in America at this moment. Their previous albums—the kaleidoscopic debut Small Medium Large and 2025’s more carefully curated but no less adventurous How You Been—make the case. Spontaneous Music Live strengthens it further.

“The Lush Detours of Momoko Gill”
The Tonearm

(March 2026)There is time to pursue feeling and not just form, a refreshing instinct that marks Gill out from her peers, whilst also making her a valuable contributor to the music that she makes alongside them. This willingness to linger in the tangential is noticeable in person, too. I sat down with her back in December 2025 for a drink and a chat in Tottenham, north London, and didn't leave for another three hours. Our conversation took rambling, fascinating detours—not all of them included here.

“Knats give jazz a dose of high-voltage noise-rock”
Line of Best Fit

(December 2025)Heaviness might characterise this single – which Woodward suspects has a sound that they’ll “never get close to again” – but it’s also a feeling of a bigger, wider sonic universe that “Take a Seat on the Settee” is tapping into; as though someone took control of the amp and whacked it up to one hundred. There’s a bright vibrancy in the horns that recalls Charles Mingus’s work on The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady, which Woodward describes as an album that “changes everything” for him. The thud of the drums and the bass underneath is suggestive of noughties rock; the distant, warped vocals of shoegaze dreampop.

“The Myth of Sisyphus”
Vittles

(November 2025)Let me be clear, before I go any further: I do love cooking. I love when I’m preparing dinner at home and my housemates wander in and say, ‘Jeez, something smells good!’ I love arriving at the restaurant and tying my apron around my waist once, twice, three times, putting it on like armour. I even love the whirr of the ticket machine as it spits out another order from a table of three who expect a whole Cornish sole in front of them in under seven minutes.
Now that that’s out of the way, I can tell you something else: in my line of work, not many people do like cooking – which isn’t really ideal when cooking is the job.

“‘I Have to Sing’: Laura Nyro’s First Songs, 50 Years On”
The Tonearm

(October 2023)The question of what a singer-songwriter is started about the time Laura Nyro was making music. Nyro came of age with a slate of musicians who made it big not just because they could sing (sometimes they couldn’t sing) but because they could write. By the 1970s it was no longer enough to be a good singer: to be notable, a true musician, you had to write your own songs too. This is an unspoken belief that is an undercurrent of how we scrutinise pop music today. But the thing is that singing is an act just as alchemical, as mystical, as sophisticated as songwriting. That’s what makes The First Songs so special.

On Molokhia
EATEN

(June 2023, Issue No. 17: Vegetables)Molokhia, like most Egyptian cuisine, does not take kindly to edits, additions, or embellishments. Even the smallest tweaks are intolerable; a helping of Heinz is nothing short of blasphemous. But Faisal didn’t get the memo. And neither, probably, did you. Unless you’re Arab, you’ve probably have never heard of molokhia, an ancient dish that is the Egyptian’s best-kept secret.

ii.

Selected Fiction, Poetry & Drama

“Brilliant Corners”
Fiction

(upcoming)It didn’t matter what she or anyone else did. The car refused, flatly, to start. Short story upcoming in Port magazine.

The Jazz Section
Drama

(August & September, October 2021)A brand new gig-theatre musical based on the true story of Karel Srp’s and Vladimir Kouril’s jazz revolution.
First staged at the Water Rats, London by the Camden Fringe in 2021, with a sell-out run. Sell-out second run at the Town and Gown Theatre, Cambridge, before transferring to an off-West End run at the Union Theatre, London.
Books, lyrics & music by Joy Gingell, Laurence Stannard and Mariam Abdel-Razek.
Production for Union Theatre run by Ryan J Productions and Rachael Nolan Productions.
★ ★ ★ ★ Musical Theatre Review

“2234”
Poetry

(July 2020)
Winner of the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize 2020.

Bad Luck Charlie
Drama

(February 2019)
Charlie has spent his entire life followed by bad luck.
First staged at the Corpus Playroom, Cambridge by the Dryden Society in 2019.
★ ★ ★ ★ TCS
★ ★ ★ ★ Varsity

“11:54PM, on the tube”
Poetry

(September 2016)
Longlisted for the Christopher Tower Poetry 2016.

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is a British-Egyptian writer based in London.