Happy New Year to all our readers, supporters and friends. We hope that you had a chance to celebrate and relax over the Christmas and New Year break. We’ve been down in England, visiting family, reading books, reflecting on 2025, and putting our plans in order for the coming year.

To begin the new year, we have published a new digital-only short, Martina Mustafova’s wonderful The Bulgarian for ‘I Love You.’ We love Martina’s work so much. This essay about motherhood, and what it means to outlive, or be outlived by, those you love is gutsy, profoundly human, subtle, and exquisitely well-crafted. It feels like such an unstable time to be alive at the moment, and this essay is a reminder of how, even in difficult times, we can be sustained by networks of care.

The essay is available now from the Wind&Bones Bookshop as a download in both PDF and EPUB formats (both bundled together) for just £3.50. Grab a cup of coffee, download your copy, and let us know what you think.

2025 was a busy one for us at Wind&Bones, and saw us launch our online bookshop early in the year. Soon after, we published our collection of fiction in translation between Taiwanese (Tâi-gí 台語) and Gaelic, Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic, working with a group of brilliant writers and translators from Taiwan and Scotland. The book has been doing really well, and has been represented at festivals and book events across the UK and Taiwan, as well as being featured in a special issue from Taiwan Insight magazine at the University of Nottingham. It has also been covered by Taiwanese national TV and radio, and—coming up next month—will be featured at the Taipei International Book Exhibition.

2025 also saw us publish Garry Mackenzie’s wonderful extended poem-essay about the Firth of Forth, Glacier, as part of our Wind&Bones Shorts series. Garry’s poem weaves together history, memory, geology and empire, and we think of it every time we cross the Forth Bridge. For friends who don’t know, the Forth Bridge is an incredible piece of history and engineering. Built in 1890, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. And the train journey across the bridge never fails to move us.

As well as publishing, we’ve been busy running cross-cultural writing workshops (including spooky ghost stories and family tales in Taiwanese). Our philosophy salon and creative writing cafés have continued apace at the Wansha Performing Arts Centre in Tainan, and we’ve also been involved in translations, conferences, a residency at the Taiwan Literature Base, and lots more. We’ve made lots of new friends and met a brilliant array of artists, writers, readers, thinkers, doers and tea-drinkers. In these unsettling times, we have really valued and appreciated working with so many people committed to the things that matter in life.

Also in the pipeline for later this year is Hilda Hoy’s Mother Tongue, an extended essay on family, remembering, language, and care. And looking ahead we’ll also be publishing Hannah Stevens’ powerful award-shortlisted short story collection, On the Bodies of Strangers, as well as our first poetry collection, in Mandarin (Simplified) and English, by the brilliant Chinese poet Ningli Deng (邓宁立).

With warmest wishes from a chilly morning in the UK,

Hannah & Will