In the first scene of The Pitmen Painters, set in the coal-mining town of Ashington in the 1930s, a group of miners have organised an after-work art appreciation class. The ...
There are several different ways of making an adaptation. You could go down the 1980s Brideshead Revisited route, which is to take the entire text of the book, get Jeremy ...
Families are like boxes of chocolates. They turn up around Christmas, full of joyful truffles and pralines, and then six days and five boxes later you’re furiously sick of them ...
This year, I’ve done a lot of reading.
This is not entirely surprising. I spent the first six months of 2011 working in a book store, and the second half on ...
This is one of the times of year that I am particularly made to notice how bad I am at being a woman. I am reminded of it in a ...
These days there seems to be a literary prize for everything. Having an argument with another author? Start your own literary prize. Don’t like one prize’s shortlist? Start your own. ...
I like to think I’m quite good at English. At least, I should be – I’ve practiced enough. While other little children were outside, hanging upside down from trees and ...
In the last month I have paid good money to see a two-foot-high furry puppet without a face doing an interpretive dance to Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’; one man methodically ...
If writing was a sport, with a poem being a sprint and a blog article the 400 metres, then doing NaNoWriMo would be the equivalent of running the marathon flat-out ...
Your possessions are alive, and they’re coming for you. While we know that the love we give our pets is returned (unless they’re cats), we can’t ever tell how our ...
