‘I walked into the back room at Dad’s house about midday with his dinner on a plate covered in cling film in one hand and a bowl of crumble and custard in the other, and he was dead in his chair.’ The opening of Siân Hughes’ new novel offers an attention-grabbing foretaste of horrors and...
HE LAY COMFORTABLY on the couch and felt the rage slowly welling up inside him. Now he had to get up, just when he felt like lazing on the couch, he had to go and take a hot bath, then a cold shower, to shave, to dress up smartly, lingering for half an hour over...
IF THERE WERE AN IKEA for playwriting – where you could easily pick up everything needed to engage an audience with what’s happening on stage – you would still need an instruction manual to assemble all those brilliant ideas of yours. In his new book Notes from a Working-Class Playwright, award-winning Leo Butler painstakingly explains...
WILF KELLY WAS RICH IN TIME. After the sudden death of his young mum thirty years ago, he lost his job. He’d swept bottles of wine onto the supermarket floor and stood in its mess, silent and swaying. The store fired him. He never found work again – and never tried. Time became his personal...
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...
IN HIS FIFTH COLLECTION of poems, Chris Emery explores the nature of wonder in its various forms of awe, reflection and the marvellous. The poems range from the absurd to the historical, the comic and fantastical – dropping us into stories and places we never quite expect; often viewing the everyday through a surprising lens…...
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...
