Skip to content
I don’t come from a bookish family, so my addiction to reading was a surprise. My mother read cookbooks, my brother read comics, and my sister preferred talking to reading — and still does. At home, my first picture books were lined up around the edges of our bedroom.
09-03-2023

Dilys Rose speaks with Doug Johnstone about her literary work including poetry, short stories, novels and historical fiction, the different technical challenges of each form, her collaborations with composers and artists and her own visual arts practice.

'Books written by friends have a special, honoured shelf to themselves. Some of them write quite a lot. I vote we ask the Prime Minister to insert another month into the year so we can catch up with our reading. The Romans used to do it, after all.'
'Jayne Anne Phillips' slim collection Sweethearts was published when she was in her early twenties. She does not refer to its contents as stories or poems; she calls the writing ‘pieces’. Each is a page, a snapshot of small-town American life. '
'These poems are never conventionally published: they skittle through the air into the hearts of whoever’s present, as gifts, ways of marking a moment that never comes again. They are poems of witness, poems that usher us over a threshold.'
'I was writing anti-poems, non-poems, un-poems. I was working so hard at writing them. It's a terrible thing: a poet who's not writing poems is an ailing creature, wailing through the night. A catastrophe for everyone around them.'
29-08-2019

Doug Johnstone speaks with Cherise Saywell about shifting from engineering to domestic noir via music journalism, exploring conflicted masculinity in his work, and being part of the Tartan Noir family of Scottish crime writers.

In the course of his writing career, Brian McCabe has discerned the influence of a number of other writers on his own work — influences which may or may not have proved enduring. Here he considers some of the more important.
Most writers need to support themselves financially, one reason why the RLF has proved a lifeline to many. Sue Fletcher pays tribute to the organisation which has enabled her to ‘write without worrying’, and reflects on the wide variety of other jobs she has taken over the years in order to support her writing career.
23-11-2017

Brian McCabe speaks with Geoff Hattersley about why mathematicians are a bit like artists, how something being funny doesn’t mean it’s light, and the process of imaginatively recreating the worldview of a child.

Back To Top