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Nov 2015 · Blog
I’ve been in Hull for seven years now … but have been supporting Leicester City for fifty. The first time I visited Hull’s home ground, the walk to the KC Stadium was grand: I…
Read more →Oct 2015 · Blog
English Heritage, like the National Trust, maintains the homes of English writers. They serve as walk-in memorials and attract countless thousands of pilgrims a year. The English are island people. We look out at the…
Read more →Oct 2015 · Blog
Bad news travels as fast as mud: the immigration officer at Seattle airport knew we were flying on to a disaster zone. Sitka sits on a mountainous island in southeast Alaska. 24 hours of…
Read more →Oct 2015 · Blog
That’s made for cheering news as publishing hots up for the Frankfurt Book Fair – Client Earth, the book I’ve been writing alongside James Thornton for the last two years, has just sold to Philip…
Read more →Oct 2015 · Writing
[Native Americans had the berdache tradition, in which a boy might be recognized as ‘gay’ from when very young. This is seen as a cause for celebration. The family with such a child was seen as…
Read more →Aug 2015 · Blog
In Highgate Cemetery, a forested hillside contains tumbling tombs. Star attraction is the grave of Karl Marx, beside a wide and gravelled path. This time, I came to hunt down other graves. As a…
Read more →May 2015 · Blog
My big writing projects can take decades. I’m not slow, but redraft a great deal. Of late, I’ve felt a desire to clean the slate. Two novels are ready to go, and a narrative poem.…
Read more →May 2015 · Blog
In his piece on the Death of the Novel in The Guardian, Will Self comments on his own PhD Creative Writing student: Creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are ‘a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme…
Read more →May 2014 · Blog
I’m tracking through a lot of books as I tackle my own nonfiction project, on climate change and environmental law. Novel reading offers some light relief of an evening – Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour nimbly blends both…
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