Blogs

What a terrific evening! A great atmosphere and very well organised by Luke, much thanks and praise are due to his relaxed and yet very effective event management skills and style of getting things done. Everyone who read surpassed any advance expectations I had. This includes the three writers who I had not found my way to reading before; Akimba, Rob Newlyn and the young man who read after me (Aidan?) I had no idea what to expect from them and...

I had the good fortune to discuss writing with Phil Klay, a brilliant author whose debut collection of short stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Redeployment , is publishing this Thursday via Canongate. He told me about what got him writing and what kept him at it – about the processes behind his work, his time in the marines and the writing communities that he’s relied on along the way. How did you get started writing? I was always...

Anne Michaels’ collections of poetry have won a shedload of international prizes, but as any literary agent knows, there’s no money in poetry. Poets that write prose tend to be good at the small things that make the larger things. This is quite a simple story of love lost and found. Jean loves Avery. Avery loves Jean. They have a baby, but it’s stillborn. They drift apart. Jean has this thing with Lucjan. He’s Polish an orphan from the Warsaw...

There’s too much football on TV. In my day it used to be highlights of Archie McPherson’s blow-away hair and sometimes Arthur Montford on a Sunday. Then we had Football Italia. Now we’ve got every game in the world all showing at the same time and billed as the biggest the best and the most important. Tickets for this match were selling for 800 Euros. John Terry, former England captain, we were told was in the stadium. I like Barcelona because...

I’m on the edge of my seat for Wednesday – when ABCtales will be meeting at the Wheatsheaf in London for another night of poetry and prose. Readings start at 7pm and the reading list is absolutely superb – if you haven't been to a reading yet there really is nothing like hearing stuff live. I can’t wait to see you all there. It’s been another week of high-quality writing on ABC. Our poem of the week is one of those that just blindsides you – a...

I’ve an admission to make. I thought I’d a fair idea what a Turk was, but I looked up Caicos in the dictionary. Only it wasn’t there. Somebody’s being fiddling with the Oxford English Dictionary or I’m a bit daft. If we take away all the plausible explanations and are left with only the daft ones then it was probably me. In case we didn’t get it, where not up to speed, a black cop told Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) what it was all about. Turks...

Dirt Music is a disappointment. I’ll need to qualify that. I read the whole 461 pages and I wasn’t quite sure, at the end, if the plane crashed, or if Fox had hallucinated such a thing, but he’s blue and Georgie is blowing into his mouth as Jim Buckridge watches on. Dirt Music is a disappointment because it’s not Breath , Winton’s 2008 book. It’s a simple enough plot. Georgie Jutland is forty, a nurse that no longer nurses. She lives at White...

I’m not interested in trains, or cars or the latest gadgets and sadly my Japanese language skills are drawn from Mary Sanderson’s purple hair and 1981 number one hit ‘he’s my Japanese boy; he’s my Japanese boy’. But this interests me because the increasingly fast train—Shinkansen bullet train to Toyko used to take eight hours, it’s under two hours now and that time is shrinking—is a metaphor for our society. Japan’s biggest train crash, 25th...

Tuberculosis is something we don’t really need to worry about here in the West. We used to get inoculated against it at secondary school and it was a rite of passage about how big the needle was how little it hurt (ouch, ouch). There was a little BCG stamp on your shoulder that showed you were a real man, and women could be real men too, with the same little stamp on their shoulder. Tuberculosis was a thing of the past associated with tenement...

The next ABCtales Reading is in just under two weeks - Wednesday, March the 26th at the Wheatsheaf in London - and we've got an excellent roster of readers. If you haven't already, make sure to book the evening off to hear from Stan , Bee , Akanbi, TFH, BarelyBlackFrancis, Rhiannonw, Robert of the Queen Mary University Creative Writing Society, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, Joe and Elsie Katz – it's bound to be an incredible night and we'll look forward...