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27-07-2023

Jamie Lee Searle reflects on the experience of building a fiction-writing practice fifteen years into a translating career.

Chris Simms explains why research is his favourite part of writing, considers the advantages of talking with real people when seeking realism in fiction, and his own scary undercover experience at the sharp end of an Alsatian.

'I think about books all the time. In bed at night, in the shower, when I’m cooking a meal, during country walks, on long car journeys. I think about books I’ve read and books I want to read. I compile lists in my head of books to buy and in what order. '
Mark Blayney asks whether we should meet our literary heroes and recalls a pivotal childhood encounter that led to his becoming a writer.
'Ian McEwan seemed cheered that the delivery boy on his cold doorstep — dressed all working class and salt of the earth against the cold — knew who he was. I asked his advice for an aspiring author...'
08-07-2021

Andrew Cowan speaks with Bethan Roberts about growing up as a working class boy in Corby, eventually taking a Creative Writing MA mostly because he liked being a student, the way his writing proceeds from the visual to the written to the auditory and the slow genesis and under-appreciated success of his first novel.

03-09-2020

Tim Pears explores the double bind that professional authors find themselves in when teaching creative writing, and the unteachable essentials of style and the ‘strangeness’ that reveals the world anew.

Andrew Cowan considers the history of university Creative Writing courses in the UK, their roots in the longer-established English Composition and Creative Writing strands in the US, and the way in which Creative Writing can be vocational even beyond the confines of professional authorship.

When she started working as a law reporter, Elanor Dymott was under the impression that she was following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens. But Dickens, she discovered, never wrote a law report in his life. Still, it made a good story…
An author’s ideas are essential to the writing process, but how and why do they arise? Katharine Grant considers various possibilities.
'The novel I believed did not want to be written suddenly wrote itself right to the end in a matter of weeks all because of a few lines I chanced to read one afternoon in a remote house in Wales.'
'I still employ that childhood sweet-shop approach of chancing upon an author I like then consuming all her, or his, books one after another until they are gone.'
'Reading as a writer and not just as a reader is a different experience, both richer and less carefree; instead of simply enjoying the ride now you are paying attention to the mechanism that makes it possible'
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