Events

‘You might get some bloke at a writers’ festival who stands up in the audience and asks: “In your “research” (titter, titter) for this book, did you really have two dicks in your mouth?” – but that’s out of everyone’s hands, and you’ll …

Psychologists say it takes us only one-tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger. While I couldn’t find any research as to how long it takes to form a first impression of a cookbook, my experience is …

A friend recently reminded me about Jessica Fletcher, the crime-solving novelist in the 1980s television series Murder, She Wrote. Played by the magnificent Angela Lansbury, she was an amateur detective and a bestselling writer, and she handled each task …

Once upon a time, there was a young girl who was bed-bound on account of her sickly heart, and so she spent much of her time daydreaming or consuming the abundant fairytales in her family’s vast library. There she found …

When I set about writing my memoir Split, telling the story of my life with Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) – or as it’s called today, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), I envisaged that it would be a mix of poetry …

As a child I only ever had two ambitions.

Being a writer wasn’t one of them.

Firstly, I wanted to be an artist, I’ve always loved drawing. And secondly, I wanted to ‘go to England’ as I’ve always been fascinated …

I am the kind of a writer who writes for sentences. It’s not because narrative isn’t important to me, but rather because I believe the shape and texture of sentences affect our narratives. The structure, rhythm and details of each …

During the writing of my new tragicomic novel, Never Look Desperate, I took the first draft of my completed manuscript away for a dirty weekend. To love it again and rediscover the connection. We stayed in a hotel with …

I began thinking about my fourth novel, Resistance – a novel about the craziness and steadfastness of family life – when I was undertaking a Masters in Family Therapy. Early in our training, we, the students, watched from behind a …

My latest book, When Ghosts Call Us Home, is a novel about being haunted by memory and possessed by art. It’s also about complicated families and an unravelling bond between two sisters. I used there literary devices – embedded …