was saving the earnings from my paper round to buy hardback volumes of The Lord of the Rings. They’d changed the jackets by the ...
If I’m honest, the characters I most readily relate to are the ones who worry too much, or are ill-equipped to deal with the subtleties of human interaction. The first ...
Myths have an explanatory purpose. They explain why the rainbow is there, for example, or why we have the seasons, or why we die—big questions. Fairytales are not like that. ...
More like Z-list celebrity. My most memorable encounter is meeting a reader in Germany who went on to become, like, an online stalker, sending me loads of emails. I was ...
A large metropolis like London or Buenos Aires cannot really be known by any of its inhabitants, unless he is forced to visit slum and palace alike in search of ...
In the run-up to our Ghosts issue, which will go online on Halloween, Litro Lab talks to actor Robert Lloyd Parry about bringing the tales of the ghost ...
I read about red-haired, freckled Anne soon after my family and I immigrated to the US. Although Anne was very different from me in many ways, I ...
Who could fail to fall in love with Holly Golightly? (Not the obtainable Holly from the movie, but Truman Capote’s unobtainable Holly.) And I fall in love with just about ...
I should say Manchester , because that’s where I’m from. But I must betray my roots and ostracise myself forever more and ...
I’d like to be able to control and influence the minds of other people, and thereby influencing their actions. You WILL buy my books. Yes you will. Multiple ...
Apart from the Blue Pirate, I’ve had literary crushes on Mr. Rochester and also Steerpike from Gormenghast (which is pretty wrong, as he’s a psychopathic murderer, but he’s also the ...
Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheepdog was quite a special one because it’s the first “big” book I read all by myself. It was a bright yellow hardback and I remember ...
I value the fact that I worked in bookshops first and then learnt publishing skills because I have the customer in mind when deciding which books to publish. I can ...
Henry Goldman of yranadult.com interviews Dr. Meg Jay, clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Virginia, who specializes in twentysomethings and recently published The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter ...
I got the publishing bug at university, when I was slightly in love with the editor of the university’s newspaper. His name was Matt, and he had delicious curly hair ...
The editors can go two ways—they might give me a brief synopsis of the book’s plot and say, “It will sit alongside these certain titles, this is the market,” and ...
I have stories that I wrote as a ten year-old about teddy bears rescuing people from fires. My parents gave me a kids’ typewriter, and I would type out my ...
I wasn’t keen on screenwriting—it’s a kind of institutionalised emotional abuse. I didn’t much enjoy doing brochure copy either, although sometimes it was fun—lingerie copy was a ...
Keep going. The only way to get better is to keep writing. And if you submit a story and it gets rejected, try again. If you submit a story and ...
When I was younger, my mum thought I wanted to be a teacher because, to her horror, I would take a Biro and write in my books, things like ‘good’ ...