Ghislaine Leung is a British conceptual artist. Born in Stockholm, Sweden to a father from Hong Kong and a mother from London, she was raised first in Reims, France and then in London, UK. She received a BA in fine art in context at the University of the West of England in 2002 and a master's in aesthetics and art theory at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in 2009. Between 2004 and 2014 she worked at Tate and LUX, London. Leung’s first book was Partners (Cell Project Space, 2018). She lives in London.
Bosses
£ 11.99
Bosses
Ghislaine Leung
Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art.
To make art is to understand how you are, to notice your prejudices and assumptions about value, to acknowledge your hand in an unequal world, and to recognise how you institute yourself – all while letting go of the outcome of work. Bosses replaces strategies of high performance with acts of trust. It is a book about doubt, about maintaining that condition and its untenable faith. About becoming a parent. Where individualism dissolves into dependence, ‘like when you get into a bath that’s the same temperature as your body, or when the summer comes and the wind touches your skin’.
- 978-1-9164250-0-2
- 15 b&w and 2 colour illustrations
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 104 pp.
- Paperback
- 05 September 2023
About the author
Endorsements (4)
The artist as receiver, giver, inquisitor, communicator. Leung’s writing is emotional and profound, engaging both the very personal and the mundane, the practical and the political. Few artists dig deep into themselves like this: an extraordinary insight into the process of producing art.
Artist as (girl) boss or maverick scab? The labour-gender question doesn’t stay put. Dialectics here grow as wildly and recursively as Ballardian botany. Leung ranges things seen, felt, sensed, thought and made against watertightness as form or as politics. The more gaps, the more space to remake reality.
I would call Bosses auto-factual. Leung accounts for work and life co-authored with facts, conjuring a prosaic and beautiful sociality. Her negations are profound, they hold and express the social apophatically. What is not here almost feels like a choice, and the thing convulses.
Some events you can never correct. One of them is childbirth. If you want to know, here it is.
Press (3)
Flood Tide
£ 11.99
Pre order in rile* books
Flood Tidetrans. Rawley Grau
£ 11.99
Flood Tide
Ana Schnabl
trans. Rawley Grau
A dazzling mix of narrative styles (even genres), a linguistic rollercoaster, and a book that demands both close attention and literary sensibility . . . The reader is hooked.
Mysterious, precise and haunting, Flood Tide suggests that every homecoming is a return to a crime scene.
In moderate physical decline, and with an immoderate weed habit, the novelist Dunja Anko returns home to the Adriatic coast to play detective and solve the mystery of her brother’s death. The going is arduous, the people inscrutable; her old friends have had years to forget – or to convince themselves they don’t remember. Dunja must contend with desire and disgust, curiosity and fear, as she begins to doubt her reasons for returning. Elegantly plotted, funny and self-reflexive, Flood Tide is a psychologically deft exploration of the trauma wrought by human limitation and indecision.
- 978-1-7395161-5-4
- 21.6 x 13.9 cm
- 232 pp.
- Paperback
- October 2025
About the author
Ana Schnabl (b. 1985) is a Slovenian writer and editor. She writes for several Slovenian media outlets and is a monthly columnist for the Guardian. Her collection of short stories Razvezani (Beletrina, 2017) met with critical acclaim and won the Best Debut Award at the Slovenian Book Fair, followed by the Edo Budiša Award in Croatia; the collection has been translated into German and Serbian. Three years later Schnabl published her first novel Masterpiece (Mojstrovina, Beletrina, 2020). She toured Europe with the English, German and Serbian translations of the book, which included a residence in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, and the first European Writer’s Festival in London. The novel was given favourable reviews and mentions in numerous Austrian, German and English media, and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel Flood Tide (Plima, Beletrina, 2022) was nominated for the Slovenian Kresnik Award. Her third novel September (Beletrina, 2024) won the Kresnik Award in 2025.
About the translator
Rawley Grau has been translating literary works from Slovenian for over twenty years, including by such first-rate novelists as Dušan Šarotar, Mojca Kumerdej, Sebastijan Pregelj, Gabriela Babnik and Vlado Žabot. Six of his translations have been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, while his translations of Šarotar’s Panorama and Billiards at the Hotel Dobray were shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He has also translated poetry by Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš and Tomaž Šalamun, among others. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lavrin Diploma from the Association of Slovenian Literary Translators. Translations from other languages include A Science Not for the Earth: Selected Poems and Letters by the Russian poet Yevgeny Baratynsky, which received the AATSEEL prize for best scholarly translation, and, co-translated with Christina E. Kramer, The Long Coming of the Fire: Selected Poems by the modernist poet Aco Šopov, which won the 2025 International Dragi Award for best translation from Macedonian. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, he has lived in Ljubljana since the early 2000s.
Endorsements (7)
If you can imagine a story that’s an unsettling mix of psychological meltdown and detective story, featuring a stoned novelist wracked with back pain, going back to her hometown in Slovenia to masquerade as a Philip Marlowe wannabe to finally find out why her older brother died, and uncovering secrets about her friends and herself she probably would rather not have known, congratulations: you’ve just imagined Ana Schnabl’s brilliant Flood Tide. Readers, come for the moments of revelation, stay for the sight of a writer unravelling her characters until they’re left raw, and you’re left hooked.
Ana Schnabl’s new novel openly defies conventional literary genres: Are we reading a family drama, a troubled homecoming story or a marijuana-infused psychological novel? In a sleepy seaside town in contemporary Slovenia, nothing is what it seems, and no one is what they purport to be … An exciting, brilliantly written book, in which the reader shall not resist stepping into the detective’s shoes.
A singularly haunting and stylistically inventive novel on the primal scenes of family origins and sibling trauma. Revitalising tropes from the detective novel, elegy, and sharp social comedy in present-day coastal Slovenia, it sings and fizzes from the page.
Schnabl’s prose is matter of fact and yet somehow thrilling. She writes with absolute clarity. Stunning.
A fizzing fox in the hen-house of cosy British crime novels. Move over Richard Osman.
A hometown return story with a turn of darkness: surreality both connecting and at once disconnecting the banal with the strangeness of grief.
We enter the story as if eavesdropping on real people – something the heroine herself confirms when she says the tale would not unfold as a psychological, sociological or crime novel, but as life itself.