Gay love stories in historical fiction
What was it like to be a gay man in Paris in 1870? While researching my novel The Beasts of Paris, I couldn’t find much in 19th-century writing about homosexual love, and even later there are strangely few literary, queer, period-set love stories (shout outs to Sarah Waters and Mary Renault), so I’m pushing the...
“An unspeakable hell” – subversive spaces in literature
This is a collection of uncanny places, of nasty, squirming, blackened spaces. In the traditional haunted house, we place the blame for fear or hysteria or death squarely on the draped and ethereal shoulders of a ghost. They pass through walls and shriek in the bathrooms and lurk beneath the beds, causing all sorts of...
Complicated and conflicted
One of the challenges I faced when writing People of Abandoned Character was the fact that the main protagonist was complicated – and a woman. I had a lot of feedback that she wasn’t likeable enough, but I was determined to keep her as flawed as she was. I think it’s a particular curse especially...
Plagued
Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars tells the story of overworked nurse Julia Power, her eager young helper Bridie Sweeney, and the real-life figure of Kathleen Lynn, a Sinn Féin politician, activist and medical doctor, as they battle the Great Flu of 1918 in the emergency maternity ward of a Dublin hospital. The intense...
Poets, pedants and survivors
Masterful reworkings of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, Maylis de Kerangal’s Mend the Living, and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith transposed to Korea head another bright batch of literary adaptations and biopics opening in UK cinemas in April. Here’s a selection to keep you dazzled in the dark at your favourite film venues for weeks...
Keep the passion
Marking the relaunch of The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writers of the Year Award, five past winners share their tips and hints for writers still seeking their first break. Andrew Cowan 1. There’s no point in advising you to read because you wouldn’t be a writer unless you were already a reader, would...
