Author Interviews

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Katharine E. Smith back to the blog to celebrate the launch of her new novel, Looking Past. As well as being an author, Katharine runs Heddon Publishing – an independent publishing house – and works as a freelance proofreader, editor and copywriter. She has a degree in Philosophy and a…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Chloe Banks to my blog. Chloe is twenty-eight and lives in Devon with her husband and baby son. She says that she started writing earlier than she can remember and was writing ‘novels’ for her sisters by the age of eight. Despite this early promise, she neglected literature for sport…
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In 2013, I had the great pleasure of hearing John Irving speak at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It’s hard to believe that so gifted a writer is dyslexic, but Irving claimed that this condition is one of greatest gifts. Knowing that he had to work twice as hard at school as his contemporaries, he developed the…
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I met Lucy Furlong when she took part in The New Libertines (described by its founder as a touring troupe of troubadour tearaways) It Only Hurts The First Time event last summer, and we recently bumped into each other at Alice Furse’s book launch, where we discussed all things poetry and publishing related with Clive…
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Alexander Games went to school in Hampstead, north-west London. He read Classics at Cambridge, a subject he would return to when getting his first ‘serious’ job, teaching Latin in a prep school in south-west London. After university, he worked on Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review magazine, then moved to Spain for a year, where he claims…
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I’m delighted that Amy Mason has agreed to appear on my blog. She is thirty-two, currently lives in Oxford and her debut novel The Other Ida has just won the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize. This year’s biggest prize for unpublished authors, it came with a modest pot of gold and a contract for publication with…
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Today, I’m delighted to invite Alison Morton to my blog. Alison writes Roman-themed alternate history thrillers with strong heroines. She holds a bachelor’s degree in French, German and Economics, a masters’ in history and lives in France with her husband. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s New Writers’ Scheme, the Historical Novel Society, the Alliance of…
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Today, I’m delighted to welcome Julie Harris to my blog. Julie is a prolific writer whose works include No Exit, The Longest Winter, Fool’s Gold, The Site, The Diamond Factory, Beyond Laughter, An Absence of Angels, Kizzy, The Edge of Nowhere, A Tear of Blood, One Act of Kindness and Anything for Love. Since 1992 she…
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Not all routes to third-party publication are conventional, but the speed at which my guest Alice Furse was picked up is certainly unusual. I first came across Alice at last year’s London Author Fair. She had recently self-published her first novel, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Shortly afterwards she was approached by Burning Eye Books,…
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Today, I am delighted to welcome Keith Dixon to my blog. Keith says that he began writing as a presumptuous teenager – producing scripts for the TV show ‘The Avengers’ and sending them off full of anticipation and ambition. Undeterred by the lack of response, he started to write short-stories and then full-length books, writing…
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