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Isabel Galleymore became fascinated by rock pools when she was living in Cornwall, and so her interest in molluscs began. They are central to her new collection of poems ‘Significant Other’. Her book asks us to think about the hidden, interior lives of molluscs and the way we tend to consider creatures without faces as ‘other’. Isabel’s poems use ingenious metaphors to give us different ways of empathising with these complex animals. Isabel teaches at the University of Birmingham and ‘Significant Other’ is published by Carcarnet.

Jill Dawson has won awards for her novels, poetry and screenplays – and she is also the author of of ‘The Crime Writer’, a fictional reimagining of the life of Patricia Highsmith (the author of the Tom Ripley novels). Jill explains Highsmith’s fascination with snails, why she identified with them and why she might have enjoyed spreading rumours about her snail- keeping habits. Jill also discusses her personal experience of keeping snails while she was writing about Highsmith. Jill Dawson’s latest novel, ‘The Language of Birds’, is inspired by the Lord Lucan case and is published by Sceptre.

Richard Gameson specialises in the history of the book from Antiquity to the Renaissance, and in medieval art. This week on The Verb he tells Ian all about the strange world of fighting snails in 13th and 14th century manuscripts. Frequently appearing in the illustrations of decorated manuscripts, the snail wasn’t seen first and foremost as symbolic of slowness – instead it was the epitome of cowardice. Richard also explains why sea-snails were linked with purple manuscripts and about his own experience of keeping a pet snail (called Aldhelm).

Verb regular Kate Fox has written us a brand new poem called ‘The Slime’, which connects the porousness of the mollusc’s physical world to the porous nature of language. Kate explains how she has been inspired by authors such as Octavia Butler, Joseph Brennan, as well as intelligent slime mould…