How do you write a funeral eulogy when you are grieving? Sophie Duffy reflects on how finding the details that illuminate a life can help mourners navigate the grieving process.
'The creation of a temporary workstation is one of the few parts of the process that I tend to romanticise. It's ritualistic for me; I want scenic spots and good vibrations. A great coffee shop is made yet better by it being the setting for a writing session. '
'I once sat on a panel with two British Asian male crime writers. There to discuss 'diversity', the three of us brown-skinned authors looked out over a sea of white faces. We were, in fact, the only non-Caucasians in the entire festival.'
'Now we are in lockdown and the city has become a very different place. There's no hanging about with a coffee and earwigging, no note-taking of angry phone calls on the bus, no sneaking off for crafty matinees at the Duke of York's cinema.'
'My last novel was set in a hotel on an island off the coast of Tuscany, and for the year that I was working on it I lived in a kind of virtual Italy. I sought out delicatessens, amassed recipe books and drew up multi-course Italian menus.'
23-03-2017
Sanjida O’Connell speaks with James McConnachie about her roots in science, blurring genre boundaries, and the opportunities and constraints of broadcast media.
10-11-2016
Christopher Wakling talks about making the transition from lawyer to novelist and capturing the joys and pains of family life on the page with humour and subtlety in books such as What I Did and Towards the Sun.
Britain transported some 3 million slaves but vanishingly few of them left a written record of their experiences. In her novels and works non-fiction, Sanjida O’Connell draws on the few fragments and memoirs that survive and on the rich but painful heritage of her native city, Bristol.