The Harker

A shout-out for a fine new venture by Old Columban Sophie Haslett, editor of a stylish new online arts magazine The Harker (and a former contributor to this blog).

In the words of the site:

The Harker is an online arts magazine that promotes and encourages young arts writers – whether they are aspiring journalists or just people who write well and love the arts. Rather than putting all your work up on an individual blog – or fighting tooth and nail to get one small piece submitted on a larger publication – we want to have as many young writers as possible regularly contributing to The Harker so that we can all publicize and support each other. We publish reviews, features and interviews on film, music, theatre, art, books and tv.We want the pieces to be written as entertainingly as possible – above all we want to encourage great writing.

It's certainly a promising start. Here is Sophie's own review of the TV hit Downton Abbey, "a series littered with specks of true heartache in between mounds of clunky dialogue and farcical stereotypes."