jeanmcneil's blog

         ‘Novels about architecture don’t sell.’ A fellow writer told me this years ago, at a literary festival in Canada. He’d written a novel about an architect which, as far as I could tell, was doing well.

Nicholas Cage delivers his elevator pitch to Meryl Streep in Adaptation (2002).

Uganda is home to spectacular birds. The country’s location in central eastern Africa accounts in part for its extraordinary diversity, with over 1,000 species recorded in a landmass the size of the UK.

In literature place has become a category of definition and an aesthetic subject in its own right.

‘There is no real life. It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.”

                                                                            – Aleksander Hemon

The effect of the recent Brexit vote on Britain’s nature policy hardly seems to be at the top of anyone’s list of post-referendum worries. In the news there has been scant attention given to the prospect of the withdrawal of EU legislation to protect the environment.

Steve Waters, my colleague at UEA, and I have assembed a cast of talented writers and actors to mount a site-specific, open-air theatre experiment at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Strumpshaw Fen reserve in Norfolk.

For the last six weeks at UEA we’ve been fortunate to have Tim Parks as UNESCO City of Literature Visiting Professor.

Christmas is upon us, and this year I’ve been given two memoirs as gifts: Instrumental by James Rhodes and M Train by Patti Smith.