Dedicated to innovation in long-form writing, Serpentine Reader provides a space for deep research, reflection and creative exploration across diverse formats. Committed to slow publishing, the Reader is published annually and fosters dialogue between established and emerging voices. With contributions from artists, writers and thinkers who are passionate about immersive storytelling and pushing the boundaries of literary expression, it embraces editorial experimentation and cross-disciplinary exchange.
Serpentine Reader is organised and edited by Hanna Girma, Senior Editor and Curator of Editorial Projects.
The inaugural issue explored the theme of Circulation and examined how we navigate flows of information, energy, culture and meaning in today’s interconnected world. From the movement of history to the recycling of ideas, circulation shapes our engagement with the world. Whether it serves as a lifeline or a loop, a conduit for renewal or a mechanism of constraint, depends on how we choose to engage with it. As Serpentine Reader itself entered circulation, readers were invited to consider the currents they are caught in, the histories they repeat and the possibilities for breaking the cycle. Featured contributors included Aria Dean, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Tosia Leniarska, Hana Pera Aoake, Okwui Okpokwasili and Gary Zhexi Zhang.
Issue 02, I Hope This Finds You Well, asks what ‘wellness’ now means in a world that feels increasingly unwell. As care becomes increasingly commodified and automated, flattened into email greetings, corporate mindfulness seminars and chatbot companions, the issue examines how ‘being well’ is performed, managed and sold back to us, even as collective conditions deteriorate. In a time of hyper-connection and deepening loneliness, self-help mutates into something more collective, more desperate and perhaps more mythic: stories we tell ourselves, and sell to each other, about survival, worth and possibility.
Contributors include Stephanie Wambugu, Eliot Haworth, Alex Quicho, Anahid Nersessian, Joycelyn Longdon, Asa Seresin, David Lisbon and Ebun Sodipo. The issue also features motivational stickers designed by Alake Shilling.
