Martyn Bedford - Writer

I’m not especially tech-savvy, so most of what I’ve written below makes no sense to me whatsoever. I’m hoping it means more to you. Anyway, I’m flattered and delighted that my short story, “Letters Home“, is among a select few to feature in a new international story app, called Gimbal. Launched by Manchester-based publisher, Comma Press, Gimbal includes 28 shorts by writers from around the world, each story set in a different city, from Athens to Zurich, Baghdad to Naples and New York to Zagreb. Among the other British writers are David Constantine (with stories set in Salford and Paris), Sean O’Brien (Newcastle and Berlin) and Zoe Lambert (Sarajevo).

My story, about an asylum-seeker in Leeds, was reissued as an e-book single in 2012 but first appeared in The Book of Leeds, published by Comma Press in 2006 as part of their Reading the City project – a series of anthologies featuring stories set in more than 50 urban locations around the world. Gimbal (named after a device which was used in ancient times to steady a ship’s compass), has taken a selection of these stories and others from Literature Across Frontiers’ Tramlines project and made them available via a new app, developed by Toru Interactive.

According to Comma Press, “Gimbal offers a new way of ‘reading the city’. Choose a city – anywhere in the world – and be transported to it by its fiction. Traverse its precincts. Map your way through its quarters or arrondissements. The Gimbal navigates as it narrates. With it you can travel by train, tram, metro, bus or indeed on foot, experiencing each new landscape through the eyes of a fictional character.
Designed with the commuter in mind, the Gimbal enables you to escape the tedium of your everyday ‘known journey’ and take an alternative route, a more scenic, imaginary one across the face of an unknown city. Choose a story according to the city you wish to visit, or the length of time you have to spare, and the listen function will lead you across an interactive map of that city accompanied by an audio reading.”

Gimbal is optimised for iPhone 5, and is also compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Gimbal requires iOS 6.0 or later. It is not yet available in android.

Click here to visit Comma’s website to find out more.