War and imagination
The Oxford Book of War Poetry has been on active service for thirty years, one hundredth part of the history of warfare to which poets have borne witness. At no point in that history did man’s inhumanity to man generate more eloquent testimony from more poets than in the two world wars of the last...
MA vs LON?
The perennial ‘Can writing be taught?’ question rarely seems far from the book pages, but a couple of creative-writing-related stories have received particular media attention this year. One was Hanif Kureishi’s slightly mischievous comment that creative writing courses are a “waste of time” (he teaches the subject at Kingston University). The other was the publication...
Alberto Mussa’s timeless fictions
My first introduction to Alberto Mussa’s writing was in 2008, when a mutual friend gave me a copy of his remarkable novel O enigma de Qaf (‘The Riddle of Qaf’) as a gift. I was immediately struck by the extraordinary literary quality; by the extensive research, imagination, and sensibility that had clearly informed the work;...
Channelling the dark stuff
The novel currently on my bookrest is 748 pages long, a new record for me. As I near the end, my left wrist is acting up. I am impressed as the approximately 235,000 words accumulate in my own Word document. It’s got me thinking about the translator as a conduit, both physical and otherwise. I’m...
