Other bits

This month has been a busy time for book stalls at venues ranging from churches to garden centres. One of the questions I am asked most often when meeting readers face-to-face is why can’t they find St Botolph and Old Billingsgate tube station (Smash all the Windows) on the underground map? It is, I confess,…
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Adita began her introduction by explaining to the audience that although the authors’ books might seem very different, both reach the same place as music, exploring memories, longings, identity and place. Noreen Masud was born in Pakistan, a country whose boundary had been shaped by colonialism. When Britain granted India independence, it partitioned the territory…
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Born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father, Karen McCarthy Woolf is a poet, teaches on the MA on Creative Writing at Goldsmiths and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her ground-breaking debut collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, was shortlisted for both the Forward Best First Collection Prize and the…
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In our back garden, almost on the boundary with our neighbour’s garden, stands a lone horse chestnut tree. It has been here longer than our house, and our house first appeared on an Ordnance Survey map in 1903. This is the time of year when the tree is just coming into leaf and, as they…
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Why mix up historical and contemporary fiction when I would make my life as a writer a whole lot easier if I were to stick to one or the other? Because I don’t see a clear dividing line between the two. For me, when I think about my father saying, ‘I remember when all of…
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I’m reading a lot of interviews with Emily St John Mandel about Station Eleven and whether or not she actually has a crystal ball, so i asked a few writer friends to tell me about the time they wrote about a fictional event, only to have it, or something very similar, come true. Linda Gillard:…
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As well as working part-time to pay the bills, together with my brothers and sisters, I am now helping my mother to care for my dad who has dementia. I urgently need to find a way to free up precious writing time. The only way to do this is by cutting out marketing time. That…
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A few weeks ago, I was watching a topical panel show. When the question of plastic pollution came up, one of the panelists replied, ‘No, you’re not laying the blame at my door. I bought plastic on the understanding that it would be recycled. It’s not my fault if someone went and dumped it in…
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For the next few weeks, Virtual Book Club will be taking a break. Instead, I’m going to bring you an exploration of the use of art in fiction. Fictionalised stories behind real painting; novels based on the lives of real artists; fictional artists, fictional works of art; fictional members of real art movements; fictional muses…
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I’m a walker who writes. In my childhood years, as one of five children, ‘I’m a walker’ wasn’t something you needed to explain. It was a given. We even had our own chant. ‘I left (start with left foot) my wife with forty-four children and don’t you think I was (skip) right, right, right. I…
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