The writer laid bare

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 …

Self-assessment is a critical skill for any writer, and it’s something that I’ve worked hard to develop, to find ways to establish a distance from the content, in order to see things as another reader would. But practicing this skill …

Once upon a time, I began my writing life the way all writers did in my dinosaur days (the 80s) – as a fiction writer. Or that was what I thought I was. ‘What you’ve written is a diary,’ the …