Karen's blog: Litro Magazine newsletters

With details of masterclasses and more, here are the latest Litro Magazine newsletters:

Dear Readers,

Who Gets to Innovate?

This week I attended the BSI Innovation Management Summit at the Science Museum in London a day devoted to the systems, standards, and ideas shaping how the UK defines innovation. Across discussions of frameworks and collaboration, one question lingered: who decides what innovation looks like — and who it’s for?.

Across sessions on frameworks and leadership the architecture of how nations now design innovation one message stood out: innovation is no longer just about invention it’s about integration.

Executives from Innovate UK, the Ministry of Defence, and Digital Catapult spoke about aligning strategy, data, and people. The ambition is clear: to build an innovation system that’s globally competitive and nationally cohesive.

Yet innovation rarely begins in a boardroom. It begins in moments of trust — a note scribbled over coffee, a partnership formed on belief rather than budget.

Years ago, when Litro was still in print, Tony Elliott of Time Out extended exactly that kind of trust. It changed everything.

Today, through The Sphere Initiative, we continue that legacy, combining AI and blockchain to protect creators and innovators, making intellectual property protection accessible and ethical.

But the summit reminded me that the next frontier of innovation isn’t just technological — it’s cultural. We need to build spaces where creativity, engineering, and policy meet; where government, academia, and founders collaborate as equals.

Standards matter. Systems matter.
But so does imagination.

Because innovation only matters if it’s shared.

— Eric Akoto

This weekend, two stories echo that same spirit of patience, connection, and trust.

In Alex Nai’s Pompeblêden, a Frisian farmer keeps faith with the frozen canal, walking each day to test the ice and wait for his son’s return. A quiet hymn to endurance and belonging, it reminds us that real change begins with ritual and belief.

In My Intruder, a man finds an unlikely connection with the burglar who keeps breaking into his home. Darkly funny and unsettling, it’s a story about boundaries, vulnerability, and the strange collaborations that form when we let the unexpected in.

Together they ask: what happens when we stop guarding what’s ours and start listening to what wants to enter?

As the nights draw in, may these stories accompany you wherever you read - on the train home, under lamplight, or beneath a slow October sky.

Until next weekend,
Eric Akoto
Editor, Litro

This Week on Litro

"My Intruder,"
Andres Vaamonde

"Pompeblêden”"
Alex Nai

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Copyright © 2025 All rights reserved.
Litromagazine.com

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND

From Budapest to Campos Street

Dear Readers,
The final week of September finds literature moving across borders—and back through time. The Caine Prize marked its 25th year by awarding Best of Caine to NoViolet Bulawayo for “Hitting Budapest.” Fourteen years on, those children still walk with us—hunger, wonder, the sharp line between worlds.

At Litro, we’re publishing another haunted city: “The House of Campos Street”—where silence presses against walls and grief draws its own geometry. It’s fiction that doesn’t just describe space; it unsettles it.

Around the world this week: the Booker Prize shortlist has landed; New York’s Global Citizen Festival folded music into activism; and the Busan Film Festival closed with a reminder that story is never bound to one medium. Litro’s role is to hold the space where these currents meet.

Alongside the shadows, something practical: our Free IP Toolkit (Global Edition)—a five-step guide to help writers and artists protect their work. These steps will anchor upcoming Litro masterclasses.

Read: Best of Caine — “Hitting Budapest”Read: “The House of Campos Street”

Travel with us—from Budapest to Campos Street, from page to plaza.

With gratitude,
Eric Akoto
Editor, Litro

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This Week on Litro

"Hitting Budapest"
NoViolet Bulawayo

"The House on Campos Street”
Sade Foo

Protect Your Work, Grow Your Rights

Our IP Toolkit distils the essentials into a simple 5-step starter—then the Litro Masterclass takes you further with practical, case-based guidance for writers and artists.

Understand copyright, fair use & contracts
Register & timestamp your work the right way
Pitch, publish & license without losing control

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Copyright © 2025 All rights reserved.
Litromagazine.com

Dear Readers,
As autumn settles in, Litro turns toward the uncanny. Ricky Olson’s “The Good Guys” takes us into the woods, where a father and son’s hunting trip spirals into tragedy and questions of guilt. George Cox’s “The Last Time-Traveller: The Stranger at the Stones” conjures a mysterious figure, where myth collides with time and science. Clarke Peter’s “The Radio” hums with grief and memory, as a family heirloom crackles with voices from beyond. And Mark Massaro’s “The Broken Carnival” casts us into a neon world of hustles, dead-end jobs, and a carnival atmosphere always on the brink of collapse.
Each story circles that moment when the ordinary ruptures and leaves us with the aftermath-violence, silence, misrecognition, or the weight of what’s been lost.

Alongside these fictions, we’re offering something practical: our Free IP Toolkit (Global Edition), a five-step guide for writers and artists to safeguard their work. It’s a starting point for Litro’s upcoming masterclasses, designed to help creators hold onto their rights even as they chase the dark and dazzling.

Read on, and keep one eye on the shadows.
With gratitude,
Eric Akoto
Editor, Litro

This Week on Litro

"The Good Guys"
Ricky Olson

"The Last Time-Traveller: The Stranger at the Stones”"
George Cox

"The Radio"
Clarke Peters

"The Broken Carnival"
Mark Massaro

Protect Your Work, Grow Your Rights

Our IP Toolkit distils the essentials into a simple 5-step starter—then the Litro Masterclass takes you further with practical, case-based guidance for writers and artists.

Understand copyright, fair use & contracts
Register & timestamp your work the right way
Pitch, publish & license without losing control

Join the IP Masterclass

Or start with the free IP Toolkit.

Enjoy any of these pieces? Show your appreciation on our socials!

SUPPORT THE NEXT GENERATION OF WRITERS & ARTISTS

Litro Tuesday Tales | September 23, 2025

Featured Story: The House on Campos Street by Sade Foo.

When Tiara returns to Lagos after years abroad, she confronts the grief of loss, the weight of diaspora, and the guarded secrets of family. Sade Foo’s powerful story captures the complexity of homecoming — the tension between belonging and estrangement, the strength of intergenerational bonds, and the resilience found in renewal.

#Tuesday Tales
The House on Campos Street

By Sade Foo

Loss

She is lost. She, a twenty-nine-year-old woman, in full charge of her faculties, has somehow managed to find herself in this predicament.

It started with dinner for three in Southampton, on a hot night in July a year and a half ago. No, not Southampton in England. She means Southampton, New York, the largest of the towns that form that Long Island fork. The fork that certain types refer to as the Hamptons. Not that she has a problem with these types, not at all. It is more how they inject the phrase into conversations when it is unnecessary. It is how they turn up their noses, and square their shoulders, and their voices develop a different pitch when they say the phrase. In any case, the where doesn’t matter. What matters is how that last dinner with her ex-husband’s parents came to confirm what she suspected before she married. It took two sentences to destroy her carefully curated life, two out of the many phrases thrown back and forth that night. “You aren’t like them, Tiara” her father-in-law said.

They were discussing the death of George Floyd, and the protests and riots that followed his murder.

Her mother-in-law must have seen the look on her face, because she followed her husband’s comment with, “It is a compliment, dear. I wish more of your people saw things the way you did. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Even now, she still feels ashamed that she said nothing. Instead, she rearranged her face into a smile, continued chewing her bland fish and spearing her cubed potatoes. She even hugged her mother and father-in-law as she said goodbye, as she left them and made her way back to the Manhattan apartment she shared with their son. Later, through floor-to-ceiling windows, she would watch a small boat bob along the Hudson as she felt the beginnings of something. That feeling would later grow, its tentacles reaching and occupying every corner of her body. She left her husband soon after, breaking him, breaking herself in the process.

Maybe broken is a better word than lost for describing her current state. It’s not like she is physically lost. No, she has just misplaced parts of herself and has no idea how or where to retrieve them. She left New York for London six months later. In January this year, she moved to Amsterdam, still wanting to forget, wanting a new start. But neither city provided solace. They gave her nothing with which she could exorcise the thing within her.

This is how she came to be in this taxi, in a place that she has avoided for years, in a city that took the lives of her parents and her younger sister in a five-car pileup a decade ago. But, when one feels grief—that bottomless of emotions—not for one incident, not for a single episode, but for a whole chapter of one’s life, one follows the tug, and goes wherever to fix what is broken.

—∞—

Read the Full Story on Litro ➝

At Litro, we are proud to share voices that reflect the breadth of global experience. The House on Campos Street resonates far beyond Lagos: it speaks to every community navigating questions of identity, memory, and place..

Until next Tuesday,
Eric Akoto
Editor, Litro

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