Out and About
Sutton Literary Festival, Part Two
Noreen Masud and Jacqueline Crooks interviewed by Adita Jaganathan
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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Sutton Literary Festival, Part One
Top Doll author Karen McCarthy Woolfe, interviewed by Shani Akilah
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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Why Mountains Play a Role in Small Eden
The Wild Woman of Carshalton
It may be Robert Cooke’s story I tell in Small Eden, but his mother Hettie undergoes a transformation of her own. Hettie’s parents were mountaineers, who named her after the ridge route in the Scottish highlands where they first met. After her father meets his end traversing that very same route, this proves too much…
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Writers Who Walk
Creativity, Well-being and Inspiration
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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Way back in September, what already feels like a lifetime ago, I chaired the historical fiction panel at Triskele LitFest. We had a lot of fun on the day. I’d like to think that was at least in part due to the preparation I put in, but it was probably down to the fantastic line-up!…
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St Mary’s Church in Beddington is normally locked during the week, but one Thursday lunchtime – my mother-in-law’s tenth anniversary, in fact – I found the doors open, and so stepped inside and lit a candle. But at the same time as thinking how much Maureen would have liked the building (pointing out that that…
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Haweswater: A Literary Pilgrimage
In search of a drowned village
Yesterday, en route to Penrith station for the journey home, our minicab driver asked what had brought us to Haweswater. I told her that it was Sarah Hall’s novel. In fact, I have been trying to get to Haweswater for the past three years. At Easter 2015, we made it up from Kentmere to the…
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You may ask why I love physical books. What could be more absorbing than trawling the bookshelves of two of the most fascinating characters of the twentieth century, Vita Sackville-West and her husband, author, diplomat and politician, Harold Nicolson? At Sissinghurst Castle, a team of expert conservationists are doing just that. This painstaking project will last…
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Need help discovering the books you don’t know you need?
Ask an independent bookseller
Yesterday, visiting Barton’s Bookshop in Leatherhead, Surrey (a place I have begun to feel very much at home), I was given a delightful little book called, ‘The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted’ by Mark Forsyth (Author of The Etymologicon. In it, Forsyth toys with the Donald Rumsfeld quote about…
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The working title for my novel, AN UNCHOREOGRAPHED LIFE, was Pelican Park (better known to some as St James’s Park) where many pivitol scenes take place. Regular visitors will be aware that the pelicans often retreat to a rocky outcrop, where only the zoom lenses of those standing on the terrace of the Swiss Cottage can reach them. Today we…
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