The writer laid bare

When I took time in my early 30s to nurture my long-held dream of becoming a published novelist, I didn’t set out to write crime fiction. But the genre had always been part of my reading mix, and it seemed …

The Nazis thought that they could train dogs to speak, read and spell, and that this would afford them a secret tool for espionage to help win World War II. The Tier-Sprechschule ASRA was set up in the 1930s and …

This January my new book, Imperfect, came out into the world. In it I explore how our appearance can affect our lives – the choices we make, the opportunities we are afforded, our self-concept and even personality. My own …

The title of this post is something of a misnomer, for there is more than one challenge inherent to the creative writing of trauma. The most frequent  claim in trauma theory  is that trauma resists representation because it is, by …

My third novel, Dinner with the Dissidents, is set mainly in Soviet Russia in 1971. It is about a struggling young novelist, Leonid Krasnov, who is approached by the KGB with the promise they will make him a literary …