Most of the time authors carefully select their settings, but sometimes the story just revs its engine and takes you off to who-knows-where. Hence I found, completely by accident, this one little scene in The Undoing of Arlo Knott setting itself at an old workplace of mine – Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.
‘Buried Letters’ appeared on BBC Radio Bristol between 7-10pm Fri 18 Aug 2023. It is is a short piece of award-winning creative writing based on Chloris Drabble
After lots of work and a long journey, and tons of support from the brilliant team at Inkubator Books, Detective Inspector Al Crow is finally ready to take on his first shift in the outside world.
A little about my third book, which takes me in a new direction, and into some potentially treacherous waters… In this novel, a bunch of private Caribbean islands band together to create a brand new nation, the ‘People’s Republic of Love’, governed by the citizen with the most followers on social media.
New dates for Hidden Gems! From landmine-sniffing rats to the mysterious ‘red gene’. Since just before lockdown we’ve been sharing the most amazing facts we’ve uncovered while researching our books. From the exploits of famous Italian artists to the birth of photography, the Spanish civil war and some astonishing quantum physics, our audiences always learn…
Writers travelling in search of better health and producing novels and journals in the process, loom quite large in English literature. There was D H Lawrence moving restlessly around the Med and roosting in the New Mexican desert, Katherine Mansfield enduring misery in the south of France, and poor Keats dragging himself to Rome – all seeking the magic cure for TB.
A biopic is a film which aims to tell a life story, usually of a historical figure and/or or celebrity in one sphere or another. The most popular examples include Ghandi, Lawrence of Arabia, Malcolm X and Schindler’s List, with The Theory of Everything, Raging Bull and Amadeus also featuring. You could claim they are filmed biographies, or set out to be.
Like many community groups, we powered down a bit during the pandemic. Meetings happened on zoom, then sometimes outdoors when it was permitted, then back to zoom, and now we are in a hybrid world of mostly meeting in person but with the option of joining via laptop. It is interesting how writers have been…
We are saddened to hear y of the death earlier this week of Bristol writer Suzie Lockhart-Smith. Suzie submitted to our spoken word event Story Sunday (The Fall) in October 2019. Here is the piece she read that night, with our sincere condolences to her family and friends. Fast Fall the Eventide, by Suzie Lockhart-Smith…
Thanks to Suzanne McConaghy for her thoughts on our recent Story Sunday event and her tips for reading online. I was delighted to be asked to submit a thousand words for ‘Story Sunday’ at the Bristol Festival of Literature. I started writing in a flurry of enthusiasm and found I’d produced something fairly bleak –…