A Few Thoughts on a Conspiracy Theory

 

 

I read a social media post today stating that new EU PPWR legislation creating yet more problems for small, independent businesses is once again the result of undue influence from big business (Amazon, etc). I have no knowledge to confirm or deny this, but I would like to suggest that most conspiracy theories tend to credit institutions (and sometimes nefarious individuals) with far greater organisational skills and real-world competence than they actually possess. This does not mean that some conspiracies don’t exist, but the more likely explanation for most events that appear sinister is often simply incompetence, and decisions that have unintended consequences. 

  Take, for example, what has happened to small businesses in the UK trying to sell products into the EU since Brexit. There is no point here in analysing the rights and wrongs of Brexit, but it was always going to impose customs, tax, administrative, and regulatory friction between Britain and its closest neighbours.

   (As well as not discussing Brexit here, I won’t mention the varying degrees of weirdness in dealing with the US which randomly imposes ever-changing tariffs and fees.)

   For a small UK-based independent publisher selling to the EU, we now have to contend with:

1. Every book posted requires customs paperwork and clearance. This additional obligation shouldn’t have been any different from exporting to other countries, but…

2. Couriers and postal operators now add customs-clearance and/or administration fees. And . . .

3. EU countries now impose tariffs on imports from the UK. Each EU country imposes a different rate, and the postal service/ country adds an admin fee to the tariff charged.

4. In theory, all UK businesses ought to have had an EORI (Economic Operators Registration and Identification) number to move goods across international borders. This is now required to post to the EU. Additionally . . .

5. Books may be zero-rated for VAT in the UK, but EU customers can face import VAT and associated charges. Every EU country has different VAT rates. To allow for this . . .

6. UK businesses ought to obtain an (IOSS) code, allowing you to report and pay VAT. Although you can choose just one EU member state to register in and file a single monthly electronic VAT return for all EU-wide sales, because Great Britain is outside the EU, you cannot register directly with an EU tax authority, but must appoint an EU-based intermediary to handle the registration, filing, and payment of import VAT on your behalf. If you sell through an online marketplaces (like Amazon or eBay), they manage IOSS compliance, but it means the time, expense and restrictions of registering and selling with them. Additionally . . .

7. EU Rules of Origin legislation needs to be considered if component materials originate outside the UK! And . . .

8. The EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) now applies, and a GPSR EU representative is required (based in the EU, not the UK). And recently . . .

9 The EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) applies to packaged goods placed on the EU market. A UK publisher exporting books therefore needs to consider the source of packaging materials, and their recyclability, as well as explain how a customer in the EU will dispose of used packaging.

On top of all the above, every postal authority handles imports differently, meaning . . .

a. EU tariffs vary between countries, varying from £0.50 to £8 (Norway.)

b. Most countries will allow the seller to pay the import tariff in advance, but others will not (e.g. Ireland and Slovakia).

c. If a customer is asked to pay fees and/or tariffs, this is not only additional hassle for the customer, but postal authorities don’t seem to like it. There has always been a problem of postmen in certain countries (in our experience, Germany and Spain are the worst) returning parcels stating they were unclaimed when customers never received notification there was a parcel to be picked up. Today, some don’t seem to want the bother of claiming a payment from a customer.

 

 

Now, all of the above means that you can’t just wrap up a parcel and add a stamp and a simple customs form.

   If you have a Click and Drop account with the Royal Mail they make you type in the name and address, and you have to add the customer’s email address and phone number (even if a parcel is not sent tracked.) The payment of tariffs and fees is confused, opaque and sometimes impossible. You print out your own labels (including an A4 customs form that has to go in a pouch.

   If you use Click and Drop online without an account, the website is better and more user friendly. But having typed in all the information once, if you hand it in to a Post Office, they insist on typing it all in again. (They don’t at a sorting office or elsewhere.)

   Technology and international diplomacy (or lack of) means that posting a simple parcel takes twice as long as it ever did. And presumably the additional requirements are a reason international post is more expensive than ever.

With every new imposition, from EORI and IOSS numbers, requirements for GPSR compliance and now PPWR legislation, we have pulled our hair out and have expected the worst. But on the whole, we’ve just kept posting books, absorbing the increased time and expense required, and most parcels do seem to get through, despite the best efforts of the administrative forces of darkness. Slightly more parcels than usual seem to be returned, but high-handed international legislation rarely allows for all the extra resources to enforce it.

   My gut feeling is that a lot of the legislation like GPSR and PPWR is there to retrospectively prosecute bigger businesses when they have been selling unsafe goods in environmentally unfriendly packaging.

   But, please remember, this is a personal perspective and does not constitute legal advice!

We remain open to orders internationally . . .

 

www.tartaruspress.com

A Few Thoughts on The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

 

Full disclosure: I decided to read Raynor Winn’s best-selling The Salt Path (2018) after I had seen all the controversy about the book. Stories published in The Observer newspaper since July 2025 suggest that important elements of Winn’s memoir have been fabricated, and authors of unreliable autobiography interest me. Primarily, I am fascinated by why they misrepresent themselves, then how they react when this misrepresentation is discovered. I am also interested in why some people are willing to continue reading authors whose integrity has been fatally undermined.

 

For those who don’t know the book, The Salt Path tells the story of how Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, undertook a 630-mile walk on the South West Coast Path in England, having been made homeless at exactly the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative brain disease. Winn recorded how, together, they endured all kinds of hardships, and had positive and negative experiences on the way. By the end of the book, Moth seems to have benefitted, against all the odds, from their arduous undertaking. Many readers felt the book showed how living closer to nature resulted in nothing less than a miracle. It may not have been a literary masterpiece, but it sold well because it hit the zeitgeist and was inspirational for many.

 

But Winn’s honesty has since been questioned. She says they lost their home and their livelihood, all their money and possessions, through no real fault of their own, and reading her account you can’t help feeling sorry for them. She is self-deprecating, and even admits that going for a 630-mile walk is an eccentric response to homelessness. The Observer, however, claimed that the couple lost their home not through bad luck, but after Winn stole £64,000 from her employer, then borrowed £100,000 to repay it, the sum secured against their house upon which they already had a £230,000 mortgage. When the debt was called in, they lost everything.

 

It is understandable that Winn would not have wanted to record all of the above details and, despite her own part in precipitating their misfortune, she would still have felt genuinely aggrieved they had lost everything. The alleged theft does not reflect well on her, but the revelation doesn’t have to derail the trajectory of The Salt Path—deciding to walk the South West Coast Path having found themselves homeless. However, it appeared she and Moth had not lost everything; The Observer has also reported that when Winn claimed in the book to be down to her last few pennies, she and Moth owned a house in France which they had been unable to sell. 

 

The publishers of The Salt Path described the book as an ‘honest’ account; therefore, pleading absolute poverty stretches the term ‘artistic licence’. Doubtless, when Winn was writing The Salt Path, she could never have imagined her book would be such a success that it might invite close scrutiny. 

 

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the book, though, is not Winns’ misrepresentation of their financial situation, but her claims about Moth’s medical condition. This is personal, and will have elicited the sympathy of the majority of her readers. If Winn lied about Moth’s diagnosis of degenerative brain disease, it would be very difficult to explain as ‘artistic licence’ or ‘stretching’ or ‘embellishing’ the truth. Since The Salt Path has come under scrutiny, a number of specialists have cast doubt on Moth’s terminal diagnosis, and the apparently miraculous recovery he has made. It is quite possible, of course, that he originally received a mis-diagnosis, and something horribly debilitating has gone into remission. It is nothing but good news that he is, apparently, much improved and still alive. It may seem very ungenerous, if not downright callous, to question any aspect of Moth’s illness, but as it is remarked upon with such great frequency by Winn in her book, questions are not unreasonable.

 

There is a telling passage in The Salt Path when a man called Grant tells a tall story about his own past. Winn remarks:

I thought about Grant’s tale and why he felt driven to tell it. When you tell a story, the first person you must convince is yourself; if you can make yourself believe it is true, then everyone else will follow. Grant wanted to be the person he created; hard done by, struggling through life’s adversities.

Did Winn believe her own story (stories)? It is possible. Was she being hypocritical when she revealed that Grant had tried to deceive her? It would not be the first time in the book she could be accused of hypocrisy. Early on in their walk, when she and Moth were in Glastonbury, she saw a beggar who was successful in part because of his cherubic looks. When he was revealed to be a fraud (somehow, she knows he is an Etonian), Winn rightly condemned him, but one can’t help considering that claiming abject poverty, while owning a house in France, looks like fraud on an even larger scale. 

 

One can make excuses for ‘artistic licence’ over finances, and maybe there has been a genuine misunderstanding of the true nature and probable course of Moth’s illness. But apparent misrepresentation of their experiences means that people have been forensically dissecting her book, even questioning whether they undertook the walk at all. But Winn has not helped her case by making other claims that seem to be clearly false. For example, Winn claimed The Salt Path was her first book, and in 2019 she won the £10,000 Christopher Bland Prize for debut writers. Unfortunately, it now appears she had previously published a book under the pen-name Izzy Wyn-Thomas. One can understand Winn thinking that The Salt Path was her first proper book, but to accept a literary prize on false pretences was not just a technicality.

 

Raynor Winn has not appeared in public since the allegations against her emerged, although she issued a statement calling The Observer’s claims ‘grotesquely unfair’ and ‘highly misleading’. Despite writing on 9th July 2025 that she was seeking legal advice, after over a year one assumes she finds herself unable to take any action against the newspaper,

 

**

The degree to which Raynor Winn falsified her story in and around The Salt Path is primarily a matter for her own conscience, and the reporters at The Observer have implied there are more revelations to come, but I was equally interested, after listening to a BBC Sounds podcast about The Salt Path, in the reactions to the newspaper reports about Winn from her readers.

 

I have written elsewhere of my bewilderment that when followers of religions and spiritual gurus discover demonstrable mistakes, if not downright lies, at the foundation of their belief system, they continue following the same course, seemingly undeterred. In many cases, I assume it is because they are so ‘invested’ that they can feel an attack on their spiritual or religious leaders is just as much a personal attack upon them. It is difficult for anyone to accept that something of fundamental importance to their lives may have been a sham, and it is natural to think you are being accused of being stupid or gullible.

 

The BBC was able to talk to people who still feel The Salt Path is an important, even an inspirational book. They had undoubtedly got a great deal from it, just as many did from Rampa’s The Third Eye, or L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, and it is still possible to profit from the teachings of frauds and liars. But perhaps there is even more to be gained from acknowledging when you have been fooled, and learning from the experience. We all make mistakes, and it takes a great deal of strength and humility to admit to them. Such an admission can be part of the learning process, and it is sometimes possible to salvage a certain amount from the wreckage of a swindle. But, the first part of the process is to admit the deception.

T. Lobsang Rampa, and Other Characters of Questionable Faith by R.B. Russell is available as a limited edition hardback, trade paperback, POD paperback and ebook.

AI: Divide and Conquer

  

Art the old-fashioned way

I admit I am a little obsessed by the problem of AI, not least because I am an author of fiction and non-fiction, an occasional artist, a composer of music, and a maker of videos. I would love to put my head in the sand, but I have to engage with the debate, not least because my day job is as a publisher and I regularly receive AI submissions. 

Usually, AI submissions can be immediately rejected for the simple reason that the technology cannot (yet) compose well-written, creative, thoughtful fiction. But, after a while, I start seeing AI where it may not exist. After all, it is only plagiarising what others have written in the past. I suspect that I receive some submissions that are AI-generated but which are then reworked by humans to erase obvious ‘tells’. I don’t think it is a problem if I mistake genuine fiction for AI (as long as I don’t wrongly accuse the author); I am simply going to exercise my judgement and reject any submission where parts of the text make no sense when they are interrogated, no matter how beguiling they might appear on the surface.

But, full disclosure, I am prejudiced against AI-generated fiction, because I would like to think I am engaging with the work of another human being. But does this mean I should hate AI in all aspects of life? If AI is better at analysing medical conditions than a human being and this means additional lives are saved, I would be stupid to argue against it, even if some medical technicians (who have spent their whole careers saving lives) are now unemployed. 

 

So far, so easy. AI fiction is bad, but AI in medical research is good. But what about all the uses of AI in between?

 

Take the case of AI non-fiction, which is notoriously bad, especially in representing information that is not well-represented online. I recently received a submission of a reference book on ‘psychic detectives’ that was obviously ‘scraped’ from the internet and was full of egregious errors and misrepresentations. I suspect that if the ‘author’ had submitted a book on a subject for which more material had been available to AI, the errors would have been less prevalent. Among my own non-fiction writing, I have published two biographies, and I utterly detest the blasé inaccuracies of Grok. But I have a friend who is a poet, and I know he would be against AI poetry, but he regularly uses Grok because it seems to be accurate in those areas that are of interest to him.

 

And how about AI in music? I am as prejudiced against AI music as I am AI prose, probably because I have always engaged with music on a personal level. I have close friends who are talented musicians, and I have been involved in songwriting myself. My musician friends all hate AI music just as much as my writer friends all hate AI prose, but one of those musicians also happily uses Grok. And a well-known band whose music, politics, etc, I really enjoy and respect (and who I assume would also be vehemently against AI music), has recently used AI art to publicise their gigs.

 

The level of our reaction against AI depends entirely on our own personal perspectives. In music this was recently illustrated for me from a different perspective. A writer told me they didn’t object to AI music because they enjoyed mindlessly singing along with catchy pop songs. What is the difference, they asked, between AI, and the modern Tin Pan Alley cynically churning out tunes recorded by session musicians for fake boy and girl bands to mime to?

 

It strikes me that AI is dividing and conquering, and none of us are immune.

 

I begin to find my own opinions uncomfortable to analyse when it comes to AI art. I have always drawn illustrations for books and have acquired some degree of competence, although I often tidy up my drawings and add colour and textures using Photoshop. As a publisher, I am also an art director, with deadlines and budgets, and artists can be awkward to work with. When Midjourney first appeared as an online tool, I explored its possibilities, but I have since decided against using it. I must confess to having less of a problem with AI art because I am less invested in it.

 

I am even less invested in film. When I heard about Particle6 making an AI film with the AI ‘actor’ Tilly, my first reaction was, how is this any different from a Pixar film? Nobody complains that Buzz Lightyear wasn’t played by a real actor? Or that Pixar didn’t use proper stop-go animation. Where’s the harm? Real people will still have to edit the story, the dialogue, etc. But then I remembered my very limited experience with movie-making, and how fundamentally important the Director of Photography will be. AI will be shamelessly plundering all the accumulated skills of generations of Directors of Photography without any understanding of the magic they perform. If I am against AI fiction and music and, yes, art, I should be just as against it in film, or any other form of creativity. It is very difficult to stop ourselves being divided and conquered depending on our level of engagement and investment.

 

All of my arguments, so far, have dealt with the threat from AI to artistic and creative endeavours, and I have noticed that many people in the arts seem to believe that their interests perhaps have more right to be defended from AI than jobs that are considered more mundane or everyday areas of human activity. One argument is that job losses as a result of AI are analogous to those lost in the Industrial Revolution. But some of those people in ‘inartistic’, ‘mundane’ jobs are not just earning a wage, and (hopefully) experiencing some degree of job satisfaction and self-affirmation, but they are offering services that, from time to time, are of vital importance, even to those of us in the arts. I can imagine somebody on a Microsoft or Apple helpline listening to AI generated music between calls, staring at an AI generated image on the wall in front of them, worried their job is going to be replaced by AI. And then they receive a call from a writer who has inadvertently deleted their novel from their laptop (it happens!) If the helpline operative is wrong not to care about the use of AI in art and music, perhaps the writer needs to question their acceptance of AI in areas they consider inartistic and mundane?

 

 

Rebecca Lloyd (1947-2026)

 

Rosalie and I are very sorry to report the death of the author Rebecca Lloyd. We don’t really remember discussing anything with Becca other than books and writing, about which she was very passionate, although we know she was born in New Zealand, studied at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and spent many years in medical healthcare, often abroad. Her Facebook page says that she was formerly a Medical Parasitologist at Gonja Bombo Hospital in Tanzania.

 

We were first in contact when Becca submitted her collection Mercy to us, which was published in 2014. She had been writing and publishing fiction since at least 2002 and had won the Bristol Short Story Prize for her story 'The River' in 2008. She had also been shortlisted in the 2010 for the Dundee International Book Prize and was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize for a short story collection in the same year. Her novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in 2011, and in the following year she was co-editor with Indira Chandrasekhar, of Pangea an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, with Thames River Press. In 2014, her short story collection Whelp and Other Stories was shortlisted in the Paul Bowles Award for Short Fiction, and her collection The View From Endless Street had been published by WiDo Publishing.

 

We published Becca’s Seven Strange Stories in 2017, and she was also published by Egaeus Press (Ragman and Other Family Curses, 2016) and Zagava (The Bellboy, 2018). Other literary awards in which she has been acknowledged include The World Fantasy Award, The Aestas Short Story Prize, and the Paul Bowles Short Fiction Award. Some of her stories were reprinted in Best British Horror, (Salt Publishing), Best New Horror, (PS Publishing), and in recent volumes of Best Horror of the Year.

 

Personally, my favourite of all Becca’s books is The Child Cephalina (Tartarus Press, 2019), which managed to be a sensitive piece of historical fiction, while being seriously weird and terrifying. In a Facebook Post of 2025, Becca wrote how surprised she was to have been so drawn to historical fiction:

Maybe I like the research, although you can easily bury yourself in it as a writer, but I also like the weirdness of things past. I've never thought horror or weird has to be invented by writers; I see both those things, and a heady mixture of both, in our very human lives.

Becca was a forthright advocate for women’s rights, continually intellectually inquisitive, and with a great sense of humour. We would like to send our condolences to her two daughters, and to her family and wide number of friends.

 

 

R.A. Gilbert (1942-2026)

I am sorry to report the sad news that Bob Gilbert has died, aged 83. Writing as R.A. Gilbert, he was a highly regarded researcher, commentator and critic in the Western Mystery Tradition, publishing important books on the Golden Dawn, Freemasonry and A.E. Waite. He may be best-known to members of the Friends for his co-editorship of Arthur Machen’s Selected Letters, introducing and annotating those written to A.E. Waite.

Bob was a long-time member of the previous Machen Society, as well as FoAM, and many of us relied heavily on his knowledge of the friendship between Machen and Waite. Bob also edited a 2003 edition of The House of the Hidden Light, an exchange of letters previously considered by some (including Crowley) to be an obscure magical text.

Although Bob was fascinated by the occult, he was, in fact, a committed Christian who found himself interested in various elements of Western Esotericism. As he pointed out in his unpublished autobiography, he was always ‘an objective and dispassionate observer’, which meant that he often upset both occultists and Christians, especially those who made outrageous claims that could not be backed up by sound, evidence-based research. Those with any real understanding of these subjects acknowledged Bob’s insight and encyclopaedic knowledge of the occult in general, the Golden Dawn in particular, A.E. Waite, Masonic history, and Christian mysticism.

In his autobiography, Bob admitted to being a lifelong accumulator of not just books, but stamps, pictures, people and ideas, and though he studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Bristol, many will have known him as a secondhand and antiquarian book seller, having a shop for many years in Bristol. He met his second wife, Patricia, in 1969, brought together by not just a passion for books, but an interest in astronomy.

I remember that Bob was keen to publish The House of the Hidden Light because he wanted to set the record straight. In his view, there was enough to be fascinated by in the world of the occult, without resorting to ‘making things up’. He had little time for impostors and frauds, and was therefore initially horrified when I told him I was writing a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa. Once Bob realised I was working from a position of scepticism, he was very happy to help and encourage me. Whenever I chatted with Bob about anything, he would reveal a deep knowledge of yet another subject I hadn’t realised he had studied (and collected), in this case Tibet. He found the country, its history and religion, of the greatest interest and, of course, was therefore an indefatigable opponent of the ‘mystifiers’ of Tibet. But this did not mean that he didn’t have a great sense of humour about subjects that he was drawn to; he sent me a long list of authors who had used Tibet as a background (often with complete ignorance of the country) in their fiction.

I know that Bob will be missed by many from very different,(even apparently opposing, backgrounds. These will be people who appreciated his company, his willingness to share his knowledge, and his delight in opposing charlatans. Of course, his family will miss him even more profoundly, and our thoughts are with them.

 

The Silent House and Other Strange Stories

Tartarus Press is delighted to announce the publication on 18th Septermber of Sophia J. Unsworth's debut collection, The Silent House and Other Strange Stories. Drawing on elements of the weird, the uncanny, and the psychological, Unsworth offers unsettling narratives of creeping unease and psychological depth.

To introduce the author, we asked her a few questions:

Q. Why write strange and supernatural stories?

A. I can’t help it! Ideas come to me in a continuous flow . . . Reality is haunted in many ways–memories, feelings, unfinished business, guilt and, of course, ghosts–they all haunt. And reality is a kaleidoscope, twist it anyway you like . . . it’s all there, in the eye of the beholder, like beauty, only strange . . . !
   So ideas come to me constantly, and in my head I am forever ‘writing’ or ‘recounting’ them to myself, putting into words whatever it is that has piqued my imagination. Most of it goes no further, but now and then one idea will germinate into a story with a setting and atmosphere that give it life. There’s freedom in storytelling! Anything can be said, suggested and explored . . . even the most far-fetched idea can have its chance . . . at least to be believed for the while it takes the tale to unfold. And, you never know, once a seed has been sown, even the most unconvinced reader may, with time, go on to wonder whether there might not be some truth in it, after all . . .!

Q. Have you always written stories? You've obviously led a full life, training, then working as a professional pianist, travelling, raising a family . . . Or has writing fiction been a more recent interest?

A. Until about the age of sixteen I was always scribbling something or other… stories, poetry… Writing is my default mode. There are some surviving 'Thank You' letters sent to my German Grandparents when I was little which reveal an inclination to be entertaining!
   Around the age of sixteen/seventeen however, the music 'fever' set in and for a professional musician (especially pianists) 'free time' is a sort of alien notion. There are no free evenings, no weekends, no fiestas or holidays - you ask my ex- kids! A pianist is constantly practising against the clock... So there was no writing, at least no writing down or, if I did, it was rarely. I can remember instances however, moments sat at the piano practising or rehearsing, when I would stop and jot down onto the score before me, a thought, an idea, or an analogy that had just popped into my head, so that I wouldn't forget (although I probably did anyway!) My scores were full of pencilled cryptic phrases!  I suppose one might say that throughout my music career, writing was brewing in the wings. And now that I have time, I have a dilemma: I have too many ideas - a full blown embouteillage, and I'm very aware that the clock is ticking...

Q. Which particular writers do you admire? And which writers do you think may have influenced your writing?
A. I feel that if I so much as mentioned in passing the name of any author, the real picture would be distorted. There would be comparisons, a search for specific influences, when in fact many voices (oral and written, alive or long dead) have contributed to make me what I am and what my writing is…
    One quaint idea, however, I will share. Some time back, I made a decision: I decided that whenever I felt like reading a book that I would need to read in translation, (for example Russian authors) I would limit myself to Spanish translations (and believe me, my Spanish is far from perfect!) It’s a decision that may have subtle and (I think) potentially interesting ‘consequences’...!

Q. You were born in Lancashire, but have lived in Tenerife since 1987. Do you think of yourself as a British (even an English, or Lancastrian) writer?  Or are you a European writer?
A. Yes, (yes) and yes respectively(!) because I don’t think it’s a question of either or… I’m the sum total of many contrasts and influences - many places and flavours, people and personalities, all alive and kicking deep within me; all vying for expression. And any influence from any place and any time, can be drawn upon for inspiration.  I suspect, however, that the ones that surface unbidden, the silent influences (the ones I’m not aware of...) those may well be the most influential.

 Q. How much has Spanish culture influenced your writing, do you think?
A.  First of all, I should mention that although Tenerife is a Spanish Island, it is not wholly Spanish.  It is a stepping stone (and, for some, a stopping stone) in the Atlantic Ocean where for centuries travellers and settlers from far and wide, have contributed something of their homelands and their cultures. It is an international place with a complex history. There is a special connection with South America. Its influence is felt in the open and friendly nature of the Canarian people, and in shared idiosyncrasies in vocabulary and dialect. For those drawn to the strange and supernatural, there is a palpable presence (that came over via the ‘new world’) of Afro-American customs and superstitions. Spells, magico-religious rituals and the like, are practised alongside indigenous Herbal Healing (ancestral wisdom dating back to the Guanches).
    How much I have been influenced by Canarian culture I can’t say, but certainly there is a clear influence in the themes of two of my stories.

Q. Is there anything else you would like people to know about your writing or your creative processes?
A. Nope! I'll leave my stories to speak for themselves!

The Silent House and Other Strange Stories by Sophia Unsworth is published September 18th 2025 by Tartarus Press

Dr. Carl Ku’an, M.D. (China)

 

It is inevitable that the publication of a biography prompts new material to appear. Just after I published Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography in 2022, two more of the subject’s ex-girlfriends got in touch with me, and I discovered letters from yet another. I know that each friendship was in itself unique, but a trajectory was followed similar to others I had already encountered (Robert swearing undying love but refusing to make any commitment, and then being heartbroken when the relationship languished).

In the case of my new biography of Lobsang Rampa, an interesting letter has just come to light—one which I would certainly have included. (Discovered by Liz Hodgkinson, to whom, thank you!) It was written by Rampa in August 1950 when he was using the name Carl Ku’an. The headed notepaper he used states that he was:

Dr. Carl Ku’an, M.D. (China), D. Sc., M.A.

which fits with the Publisher’s Foreword in The Third Eye in which it is stated that:

Lobsang Rampa has provided documentary evidence that he holds medical degrees of the University of Chungking [in China]

It should be noted that despite the publication of his previous biographies, Rampa only mentioned his previous personas as Dr Carl Ku’an and KuonSuo in his sixteenth (conventional) book, As It Was! (1976). In this he wrote that when he went to China,

I was instructed, I must take a different name, I could not use my own name of Rampa . . . Now, how could a poor Tibetan boy, one just approaching manhood, admittedly, but how could he pick a Chinese name when he didn’t know anything about China? I pondered on that awful question, and then unbidden, unexpectedly, a name appeared in my mind. I would call myself KuonSuo . . . But it was a name which people found difficult to pronounce—Western people, that is—and so it soon became shortened to Ku’an.

In the letter, Dr Ku’an is seeking employment and states in his letter that he has ‘a very large income’ (which would not have been the case for the poor Tibetan), but that his money was in the National Bank of China and had been seized by the Communists.

 

Cyril Henry Hoskin (left) and Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (right)

The letter dates from a period when Cyril Hoskin/Rampa had become interested in ‘the East’ (to use a very general term), but nowhere in the letter is Tibet mentioned. He was obviously yet to refine the persona of ‘Tuesday Lobsang Rampa’ or the story that would be told in The Third Eye in 1956. (Let alone the transmigration explanation required in 1958.)

Rampa’s claim to be a Chinese medical doctor, along with his other dubious distinctions, might be dismissed as harmless make-believe, if the letter were not an application to act in an informal medical capacity. The letter was to Robert Cowell, addressing Cowell’s desire to change sex and live as a woman (Cowell would later become Roberta). Liz Hodgkinson believes that Michael Dillon (whose own sex-change is discussed in the new biography) probably introduced Robert to Ku’an. Ku’an states that he has had ‘experience of similar cases and really know[s] what is entailed’.

Rampa comes over in the letter as sympathetic and non-judgmental (making allowances for the letter being essentially a speculative job application). As Liz Hodgkinson has written to me, ‘It is more than likely that in Dillon and Cowell, Ku’an saw two soulmates, in that they radically changed their appearance, gender and place in the world at a time when this was extremely rare.’

I am sure that this is right.

   To know a great deal more about the Rampa story, you will need a copy of T. Lobsang Rampa and Other Characters of Questionable Faith, published by Tartarus Press.

With thanks to Liz Hodgkinson, author of From a Girl to a Man: How Laura Became Michael.