Pester, Ben
Entry updated 25 August 2025. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) UK technical writer and author whose short fiction, mostly assembled in Am I in the Right Place? (coll 2021), anatomized and at points fantasticates the urban domestic, with a focus on places – malls, workplaces, hotels – where surveillance and consumption turn each other on. Similar venues also shape his first novel, The Expansion Project (2025), though from the estranged anthropological point of view of an "Archivist", centuries hence, attempting to register the true flow of early twenty-first century life (see Ruins and Futurity). The actual protagonist, whose work as a "content" massager seems opaque to him (and to the Archivist), and who is in a state of anguish about raising a human family in the new world, may seem from the angle of this tale to be Everyman. [JC]
Ben Pester
born UK
works
- Am I in the Right Place? (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Boiler House Press, 2021) [coll: pb/]
- The Expansion Project (London: Granta Books, 2025) [hb/]
links
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