Cities of the mind
04th, Jun 2017
‘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.
Blog
Adapting to the film world
19th, Mar 2017Nicholas Cage delivers his elevator pitch to Meryl Streep in Adaptation (2002).
Shoebill safari
03rd, Feb 2017Uganda 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.
Writing about Place: Estuary and Four Fields
09th, Dec 2016In literature place has become a category of definition and an aesthetic subject in its own right.
Autoficción – the new novel?
01st, Oct 2016‘There is no real life. It’s always the story of your life that you’re living.”
– Aleksander Hemon
What will Brexit mean for nature?
30th, Jul 2016The 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.
Theatre in the Wild - RSPB Strumpshaw Fen
27th, May 2016Steve 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.
The Novel: a survival skill – reading fiction with Tim Parks
29th, Feb 2016For the last six weeks at UEA we’ve been fortunate to have Tim Parks as UNESCO City of Literature Visiting Professor.
Ice Diaries - an Antarctic memoir
31st, Jan 2016In March 2016 I will publish Ice Diaries - an Antarctic memoir. It's a book about ice and its properties, both emotional and physical - a tale of ice and the polar regions and a travelogue filtered through a personal climate change story.
M is for Memoir – what makes memoirs work?
21st, Dec 2015Christmas is upon us, and this year I’ve been given two memoirs as gifts: Instrumental by James Rhodes and M Train by Patti Smith.