Footnote is a new journal for artistic exchange. Each issue, we invite writers, photographers and artists from around the world to respond to a word, phrase or idea in a central text, fostering new connections between disciplines and approaches.

For the central text of this inaugural issue, the poet and novelist A.K. Blakemore has written Peg, a hallucinatory story of mutation and decay. Blakemore’s style has been celebrated for its “animating tactility”; in a review of her award-winning first novel, The Manningtree Witches, the journalist Claire Allfree describes her writing as “lingering with almost wanton sensuality on taste, touch, colour and smell.” In Peg, Blakemore’s precise, visceral prose forms a rich source of inspiration for an original series of writing and artwork, and the atmosphere of her murky, unsettling story runs through the issue. Featuring Jack Davison, Sarah Blais, Joe Cruz, Brian Dillon, Eley Williams, Eduard Sánchez Ribot, Nam Le, John Sunyer, Feargal Sharkey, Kevin Brazil, Joe Gamble, Daniel Benson, Mattia Balsamini and 'Pemi Aguda.