The Writer Laid Bare

It is strange to consider one’s earliest male literary influences as a short story writer when one was not, at least initially, influenced by their gender. Well, I say, I wasn’t particularly influenced. There was, however, a writer who in …

Reading and writing are intertwined activities for me. I am drawn to reading and writing for the same reasons: to engage in a story, in different worlds, in extraordinary words.  I can’t remember a time in my life when I …

When I opened Lee’s email and saw her kind invitation to write a guest post for her blog, my instinctive reaction was – ‘Oh shit!’ Not, of course, because it was from Lee (whom I adore and admire), but because …

Last year an editor I’d worked with made what I initially thought was a puzzling remark about my writing. ‘I find your Russian worldview fascinating,’ she said. The work-in-question had nothing to do with Russia. Plus, while I’ve written in …

‘ . . . books, if they need to be written, will always find their moment.’

                                         Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

As writers, we often experience the thrill of discovering a new narrative strategy and applying it to …

The recently departed Spanish novelist Javier Marías, asked once to identify the moment when he knew his vocation was that of writer, responded that in fact he had never wanted to be ‘a writer’. He drew a fine distinction between …