Now A Major Motion Picture, a novel by Peter Wise: for Christmas

November 14, 2025Books, Christmas, Creativity, Fiction, Gifts, Hope, reading, Reviews, Storytelling, Writers, Writing

If you’re wondering what to buy for the readers in your life for Christmas, can I suggest a gloriously-funny, poignant, heartfelt, beautifully-written novel about the hopes and dreams, ambitions and desires of an unknown screenwriter who gets a call from an Oscar-winning director and dares to believe that, this time, one of his screenplays will … Read More

Hamlet on the Titanic

April 14, 2025Art, Fiction, Good Things, Language, Plays, Psychology, Titanic

This 15th April is the 113th anniversary of the night RMS Titanic sank. My great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, was, ‘One of the lucky ones’, as she wrote three days later. Lucky not only because she survived, but because none of her beloved menfolk had sailed from Southampton with her. If they had, they would have died in … Read More

A Valentine to Life: What Does It Feel Like? Sophie Kinsella

February 14, 2025Art, Books, Creativity, Death and Dying, Fiction, Health, Hope, Kindness, Love, Psychology, Valentine's Day, Writing

Unlike forty-five million people worldwide, I’d never read a Sophie Kinsella novel until I picked up What Does It Feel Like? in my local bookshop a couple of weeks ago. But if, like me, you’re not one of the forty-five million and you think you might never be: read this one. It’s funny. It’s optimistic. … Read More

Language: how it means everything, and nothing

July 14, 2024Allyship, Antiracism, Art, Artists, Equality, Fiction, Human Rights, Kindness, Language, Listening, Literary Prizes, Plays, Refugees, Storytelling, Theatre

A couple of weeks ago some friends suggested we see ENGLISH, by Sanaz Toossi, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s finished its run now, but if you see it advertised anywhere, go. Toossi wrote the play after the travel ban, colloquially known as the Muslim Ban – ‘a licence to discriminate, disguised as a “national security … Read More

Windrush, 75 years on

June 14, 2023Allyship, Antiracism, Art, Black History, Books, Creativity, Democracy, Equality, Fiction, History, Human Rights, Morality, Racism, Windrush, Writers, Writing

Seventy-five years ago, on 22 June 1948, HMT (His Majesty’s Transport) Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks, on the River Thames. She was named, as many empire ships were, for a British river, in her case the River Windrush, a small Thames tributary. Windrush brought 492 passengers to Britain from several Caribbean islands including Jamaica … Read More

What does it mean to be good?

May 14, 2023Allyship, Art, Artists, Equality, Fiction, Goodness, Morality, Plays

In a 2013 article by Steve Taylor PhD in Psychology Today, good is defined as: a lack of self-centredness … the ability to empathise with other people, feel compassion … and put [others’] needs before your own. It means … sacrificing your own well-being for the sake of others. It means benevolence, altruism and selflessness, … Read More

Ask not what trees can do for us, but what we can do for trees

August 14, 2022Books, Climate Change, Creativity, Fiction, Places, Poetry, Recycling, Trees, Walking

Last weekend I walked through a wood. Sunlight filtered through the  leaves and made me think how medieval stonemasons must have been inspired by the branches of trees gathered in arching vaults above them when they imagined their cathedrals. In a modern reversal, in Italy, near Bergamo, there’s a tree cathedral: And, at the entrance … Read More

Reading Black Writers

May 14, 2022Allyship, Antiracism, Art, Creativity, Education, Equality, Fiction, History, Human Rights, Literary Prizes, Mental Health in Fiction, Morality, Psychology, Racism, reading, White Allies, Writing

Until George Floyd was murdered on 25 May 2020, I had not begun to acknowledge, let alone unearth, my inherent racism. That racism includes not reading or even thinking about the work of Black writers. But since that May I’ve been reading Black writers and my eyes, ears, heart and mind have been opened (about … Read More

Reading as a writer. Writing as a reader. And the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021

August 14, 2021Books, Creativity, Fiction, Literary Prizes, Psychology, reading, Writers, Writing, Writing Courses

Last week a friend of mine and I talked about the six books shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. We’ve done it before and it’s always illuminating (and fun) but because we both write fiction, our conversations are often also about the nature of reading fiction as a writer. Neither of us read – … Read More

Black Minds Matter (BMM) : donations #BMMUK21K

July 14, 2021Allyship, Antiracism, Fiction, Health, Human Rights, Mental Health, Mental Health in Fiction, Mindfulness and mental health, Psychology, Racism, Writing

I’ve been in therapy, but the reasons for my therapy have never included the trauma of racism, of living inside a black or brown skin in a white-supremacist society. Nor have I been misinterpreted because the colour of my therapist’s skin was different from my own. Which is why Black Minds Matter (BMM) is so necessary, … Read More

Bookshop.org: an online bookshop that supports indie bookshops. And, ‘It’s easier to be a Dad, this morning … .’

November 14, 2020Antiracism, Books, Bookshops, Democracy, Equality, Fiction, Good News, Good Things, History, Human Rights, Living Standards, Morality, News, News Outlets, Politics

Bookshop.org, as the Guardian articles below suggest, is exactly what the publishing world has been waiting for. Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops (it doesn’t undercut them, as the unmentionable does) and it makes it possible for independent bookshops to benefit from online sales wider than they, on their own websites, could reach. From this article: Bookshop.org is being … Read More

100 Novels That Shaped Our World; free travel with a book and One Green Thing

November 14, 2019Climate Change, Creativity, Fiction, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Travel

Four women and two men have just chosen 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. The choosers are: Stig Abell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Syima Aslam, founder of the Bradford Literature Festival, authors Juno Dawson, Kit de Waal and Alexander McCall Smith and journalist Mariella Frostrup. The 100 novels are divided into 10 categories: Identity; Love, Sex … Read More

City Tales, and Hive

September 14, 2019Bookshops, Fiction, Places, reading, Reviews, Storytelling, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Uncategorized, Writing

Since 2004, Oxford University Press has been publishing volumes of City Tales, collections of short stories set in European cities translated into English. The guiding idea is to give the English-speaking reading traveller (I paraphrase): Stories expertly translated by writers with an intimate knowledge of the city in question. The collections have black-and-white photographs to illustrate each … Read More

Janet Clare on getting published later on, and Vice’s Broadly.

August 14, 2019Creativity, Cyberspace, Fiction, Internet, Psychology, reading, Rewriting, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Women, Writers, Writing, Writing Courses

I’ve been meaning to read this article by an older writer about starting to write later in life and how, after a very long writing journey and the discovery that every writer makes at some point, that all writing is rewriting, her novel was published. It’s only taken me eight months to get round to … Read More