CHANCING UPON THE WORK of an obscure writer in your genre or field – one before overlooked – triggers joy with a twinge of embarrassment. After all, most authors are proud to know literary predecessors and ‘the competition’. The surprise discovery feels a bit like snatching an Easter egg while competing in the hunt with...
PALESTINIANS HAVE THIS JOKE (it’s not very funny): A Gazan is running frantically down the street. Someone grabs him and asks: ‘What’s going on? Has something happened?’ ‘No,’ the man replies, ‘but it might.’ Through 77 years of occupation, violence, displacement, and repeated collective punishment, Palestinians have never stopped running. Not just from the soldiers...
LITTLE COULD THIS dyslexic boy, growing up in a small mountainous village in Epirus in the 1960s, have known that he would go on to conquer the worlds of academia and literature, with his unruly imagination as his only weapon. When his memoir Chronicles of a Dyslexic Author was published in Greek in the summer...
MEMOIRS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES involving famous relatives are an intriguing read as they offer a backstage pass to history, combining private lives with public myth. After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal by Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s only grandson, comes to mind. As does Two Flamboyant Fathers by Nicolette Devas. The daughter of Irish poet Francis...
I LIKE ORIGIN STORIES, especially how a writer came into their powers. Whose life was swept away with a memo from Personnel. How that GP’s news became a license to write stories about divorce. Filthy jobs and warehouse nights. Squats and baggies and needles. That sort of thing. Of course, for some it was all...
A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE of one of British cinema’s most singular filmmakers, Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies is an extensive season of film screenings at BFI Southbank and beyond. Programmed by BFI Chief Executive Ben Roberts, providing a comprehensive journey through Davies’ body of work, the centrepiece is a UK-wide theatrical...
IT WAS SUNDAY. MÓNICA WANTED to hang a picture on the wall, a small Walter Lazzaro reproduction, and I didn’t want to. The wall wasn’t actually a wall, but one of the four square columns that delineate the perimeter of the room. It’s a narrow column, but wide enough to hang a small picture on...
ONCE I BECAME AN ADULT, I looked back and saw the teenager I had been: studious, insecure, wary of role models, unable to blend in. That young girl – with vain, golden ballet shoes on her feet – couldn’t understand her peers, and at every moment expected a sudden slap, a pocketknife pulled out, a...
I SENT MY FIRST MANUSCRIPT OUT in December 2003, when I was 14. It was a 100,000-word fantasy novel about dragons, and I explained to the lady behind the Post Office counter how I was going to be a published author. She was like, “Ooh, I’ll watch this space.” No agent, at all, wanted to...
“IT’S ABOUT TIME WE ACKNOWLEDGE IT: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colors fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent...
WE’RE TWO WEEKS INTO the hottest summer since records began. The chalkland garden outside the house is cringing and wilting despite my best efforts with the old zinc watering can. The molten heat melts candles on windowsills, and the blinds do little to defy the suffocating power of the normally welcome sunshine. I’m hot, bored...
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, my parents would walk me out into the wilds of England’s moorlands in a bright-coloured anorak, wellies that squelched. I didn’t like walking then; I was a sickly child with constant migraines, preferring to read books curled on the sofa. And so, dragged across the barrens with a blinding stick...
