What is The Pompey Saga?

The Pompey Saga is about a group of five friends studying at the University of Portsmouth. It is reflective of Luke’s time at university, being based on the friends that Luke made during his three years of studying.

The stories involve these characters trying to live in a very complicated world, one that is filled with challenges and hardships that they can’t seem to navigate alone, but might just be able to with the help of one another.

It is like Heartstopper, but ruder and more adult. It is like a Fredrik Backman novel, but not as profound. It is like Friends, but actually acknowledges the characters’ mental health issues.

The Pompey Saga is an ode to the people who transform us; to the people who really see us; to the people who love us unconditionally.

The History of The Pompey Saga

The Pompey Saga began development during summer of Luke’s first year of university. Having just spent the year meeting a bunch of wonderful people - people he would soon call friends for life - he came up with a bunch of characters for a novel that he was working on; a group of friends loosely based on the people he had met over the past year. Whilst that novel idea didn’t quite work out, the characters remained in the back of his mind, and he kept thinking of potential ways to utilise them.

Throughout the next two years, as events continued to transpire in his real life, Luke soon realised he wanted to write a love letter to the friends that he made at university; the people who taught him what friendship really meant. When tasked with crafting a short story to reflect his future writing career during one of his final modules of his degree, Luke decided to revisit those characters he created two years prior, creating a short story involving a group of friends simply enjoying each other’s company, albeit with some chaos and plot conveniences for the sake of a narrative.

Initially called ‘Queerness and Mental Illness’, the short story received a top grade from his lecturer, with them remarking that it was an “engaging and entertaining character study”. This positive feedback inspired Luke to continue coming up with ideas for these characters, crafting more short stories and even a novel.

Whilst the novel is currently in early stages of development, Luke continues to develop these characters and their lives further through short stories, hoping that others too will understand why his friends are incredible and see that friendships are severely underrated.