Nathalie Abi-Ezzi on the power of storytelling to create community, identity and belonging, and how a textile art project in London’s East End pushed the boundaries of her work.
03-08-2023
Juliet Gilkes Romero speaks with Ann Morgan about childhood influences, developing a love of storytelling and how a career in journalism led to shaping narratives for the stage.
08-06-2023
Malachy Tallack speaks with Caroline Sanderson about how moving to Shetland as a child influenced his writing preoccupations, particularly his sense of place and the role of belonging , and how these things have come to imbue his varied fiction and non-fiction writing.
Jini Reddy on discovering travel writing and how fresh, diverse voices are pushing the boundaries of the genre.
'Most human perception is probably lucky guesswork. To be truly an outsider, therefore, brings this disadvantage to the fore. I found, when researching books in India and Pakistan, that because I knew nothing, I was always in a questioning state.'
'As spring tore away from the calendar of seasons, summer sprinted on with face masks and hand washes, and the centuries-old talk about the weather shifted to the uncertainty of regulations about Covid. I started heading out earlier in the mornings.'
19-01-2023
Lawrence Sail speaks with Ann Morgan about the importance of fallow periods, the difficult art of writing about and for people you know, the difference between a poem and a description and being drunk on the power and enjoyment of words.
'I had a Saturday job at a hair salon in London’s Soho. The stylists, all from northern Italy, would complain about their husbands in their dialect. Many of the customers were prostitutes; they’d exchange news in a secret code. I spent my early years eavesdropping.'
'Working on a book can be gruelling. The feeling that you’re writing into a void can spawn an imagined readership of crippling inner critics — and make it harder to nurture the two qualities that a writer needs above all: self-discipline and self-belief.'
Helen Kelly on how to research a novel when you can’t travel, the challenge of writing about places you have never visited, and how she found a wealth of inspiration close to home.
'It took years, decades, for him — while he morphed into me — to grasp that his project was fiction and there was no pattern to follow. If a novel, it would deserve that name. I was never tempted, for example, to foreground one or more of my 'people'.'
25-08-2022
Bethan Roberts yearns for Anglesey, a place of family history, childhood holidays and a beautiful, mysterious family language.
Morgen Witzel explores the moods of Dartmoor, and surveys the many writers, including himself, who have been inspired by its solitude.
Rebecca Goss looks up at the skies she's lived beneath, and considers how they've shaped her writing from above.