The Writer Laid Bare

‘ . . . 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 …

I grew up in a house without books. My parents loved TV, and occasionally listened to one of our two LPs — Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley — but they weren’t in the habit of reading.

One day, I heard …

I once had coffee with a fellow author – let’s call him Justin Heazlewood – and a few minutes in, of commiserating about the writer’s lot, I was bemoaning that I’d wasted an entire year on some aborted project or …

I was a backpacking 21-year-old when I got off a ferry from southern Spain to the port city of Tangier in Morocco with four Australian friends. Once on land, we had to run the gauntlet of what we called, simply, …

The wind is changing and I’m not even talking about the elections. This particular wind is breezing through my blog, which is now eight years old.

For eight years I’ve kept the same hybrid format, publishing my eclectic musings about …