writing

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

Attention-Seeking Behaviour (2026)
Peninsula Press | Graywolf Press

The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour thinks you should know about the body she found in the park. She thinks you should know about her sex life, which is fulfilling and systematic. She thinks you should know that she is a writer, that she is ‘complex, creative and nasty’. But above all, she thinks you should know that she is a compulsive liar.

Attention-Seeking Behaviour is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction – memoir, novel and essay – it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying.

‘Attention-Seeking Behavior is, in some ways, in the cerebral tradition of novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. But where those novels simmer, this one boils over with bitter humor, bad sex, class rage, wild rhetorical swerves and metafictional psych-outs, all of which demonstrate Varfis-van Warmelo’s exquisite control over the chaotic proceedings, and make good on the ambivalent promise of her title. This is a powerful, provocative debut novel by a writer who commands, and deserves, your full attention.’
—Justin Taylor, The New York Times

‘There’s nothing neat or tidy about Attention-Seeking Behaviour. It’s a text that’s both slippery and spiky, illuminating and opaque, on occasion distressing, other times sexy, and often very funny.’
—Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph

‘Weird and compelling.’
—Suzi Feay, Financial Times

‘For lovers of unreliable narrators, this slim novel winds its reader . . . like a deft and lethal spider.’
—Caroline Reilly, Forbes

Intellectual Property (2024)
Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art

Intellectual Property is a series of long-form poems that propose the law of intellectual property as poetry’s dark twin — both forms task language with the burden of shaping the intangible, and both forms consider human ingenuity to be of infinite value. Weaving through a series of landmark disputes, the poems apply the laws of intellectual property to our private lives and seek to determine what constitutes an idea, and whether we can ever own one.

‘Profoundly moving without ever lapsing into the sentimental commonplace; balancing the heartfelt and the cerebral, a cool warmth pervades throughout.’
—David Collard, Review 31

‘Varfis-van Warmelo’s pamphlet adjudicates with effortless verbal fluidity’
—Katrina Nzegwu, The London Magazine

Poems/Essays

Sand / A Glimpse Of / The White Review / National Poetry Library / Tolka / Art Review / Rialto / Visual Artists Ireland / Spam Zine / Wet Grain / From Glasgow to Saturn / The Open Arms / Goodbye Scarecrow

Prizes

Shortlisted for The White Review’s Poetry Prize / Shortlisted for the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types prize