Check out the latest news from the RLF, WritersMosaic highlights, and Collected – our collection of interviews, reflections and articles exploring the literary life and world of writers today.
So I write about lives under totalitarian regimes, in the hope I’ll offer some sort of inoculation against political extremism.
I now find it difficult to read fiction while I am writing it; I’m looking at structure, style, technique, how…
The self, looking for the self, is the perpetually failing attempt to locate some defining quantum of fixed personality, some…
Two very different teachers put the crazy notion into my head that the daughter of an Irish labourer and a…
All of my reasons are personal, and selfish. It’s absorbing, challenging and so on. It also sounds cool, and there’s…
What made my admiration of Alan Plater complete was that there were a number of years when both he and…
Ted Hughes went on to stress how important it was to keep my creative energies at top pressure by living…
I lie silently as the last dregs of my once transcendent seriousness drain away. What I’m mostly feeling now is…
The truth is that this ageing RLF Fellow is not much surer why he does it than was the poetry-writing…
If I move to my laptop too soon I find it cuts off experiment and somehow ‘sets’ the poem in…
I didn’t want to write about grief, or jealousy; I wanted to write about someone shopping at Tesco and suddenly…
Voice, for me, has to be a tool or it is nothing, and writing, for me, is not self-expression, it’s…
