I didn’t know when I set out yesterday that my second outing to The Promised Land was to be my last. For Poetry on Tap, at any rate. (As far as I know, they’re continuing to operate as a pub and there will, therefore, continue to be beer and other beverages on tap.) Poetry on Tap, the monthly event which…
The second (afternoon) session of the London Book Fair Masterclasses was How to Write for Screen: Film & TV. Again, it was a panel discussion, this time chaired by Julian Friedmann (Agent, Blake Friedmann) with Paul Ashton (Producer, BBC Writersroom), Craig Batty (Author & Senior Lecturer in Screenwriting, Bournemouth University) and David Nicholls (Screenwriter) on the panel. Having met up…
I rarely start my days at 5am. In fact, I’m much more likely to be finishing them at that time. However, for my second trip to the London Book Fair Masterclasses (the first was in 2006) I decided to make the effort, get up at Stupid o’clock (that’s 5am to you) and sleep on the Megabus from Cardiff – if…
According to Welsh medieval legend, Ceridwen was an enchantress, who used her magic cauldron to cook up a potent potion that imparted wisdom and poetic inspiration.
After being thwarted by the freakishly heavy snowfalls and equally freakish (for I am never sick) illness of January, I decided that, with the advent of February, the time had come to get out there and try another literary event and network some more. My first attempt in December had gone reasonably well and I’d come home buzzing with ideas…
I have discovered a downside to working from home. When it snows, you can’t really justify not working because – well, you’re already at the office. It’s not as if you can’t make it down the hall or stairs to wherever your office happens to be. (I’m assuming that roof leakage is not an issue here and you don’t have…
I am buzzing from having been among such talented and varied voices for the evening and don’t think that I’ll be able to sleep for quite some time to come. Maybe I should seize the moment, pour myself a glass of amaretto and put pen to paper? To launch the Women’s edition of Roundyhouse poetry magazine, there was an evening…
I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry, NaNoWhat? Oh, that. Curses, you remember. Yes,okay, confession time. I did mention that I was considering signing up for NaNoWriMo – that stands for saying goodbye to your life for a month in order to write a novel, or, at least, 50,000 words of one. When I said that I was…
This is a beautifully written book that vividly imagines the extraordinary life of a remarkable man.
Owen Sheers finds a book in his father’s study which puts him on the trail of one of his distant relations, Arthur Shearly Cripps, also a poet. The journey takes him from the Rhodes Library in Oxford to modern-day Zimbabwe to London as he traces the life of his missionary ancestor, who left England at the turn of the twentieth century for what was then Southern Rhodesia.
In July 2008, on the way back from Italy, I visited the Becourt Military Cemetery, Becordel-Becourt, near Albert in northern France. Years earlier, my mother had made a promise to her own mother that she would make the trip and find the grave of one of my cousins, Private W S MacKay of the Seaforth Highlanders, who died there on 14th September 1915 aged 19.