Man-Eating Typewriter signed first edition, published by White Rabbit, 2023.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2023

‘I am an ugly man, a meese meshigena-omi, but a fashionable omi. And soon to be a molto famous omi. Lell my lapper.’

Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy purveyor of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.

Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet’s jailbird fantasies, Man-Eating Typewriter is an act of seductive sedition by a writer wth unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.

‘Outrageous, audacious and shameless, Man-Eating Typewriter is a brilliantly constructed murderous lark. Like A Clockwork Orange adapted by John Waters at his most gleeful’ - John Higgs, author of William Blake vs the World and Love and Let Die

‘Milward has created a very rare beast of a book; one that is propulsive, relevant, outrageous, and often alarmingly beautiful. Here is a novel that lays bare the depravity of human impulse, whilst testing the limits of language and form with masterful ease and reckless glee… Has all the transgressive energy of a cult classic in the making’ - Maddie Mortimer, author of Maps Of Our Spectacular Bodies, judge of Goldsmiths Prize 2023