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.
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.
Every so often I stumble upon a book or a film or new music through what is often a throwaway remark by a friend or an acquaintance. Either their comment or the premise or name of whatever it is simply piques my interest and I make a note of it or, and this is far more likely, I stop what…
Jeremy Northam is proving to be an interesting travelling companion. In 2008, after first splitting our time between languidly idling among the dreamy spires of Oxford and staying at an imposing stately home in the English countryside, we flitted off together for a brief sojourn on the Venetian lagoon, before later wandering the souks of Morocco.
I was fortunate enough to win a signed copy of Miranda Dickinson’s wonderful debut novel Fairytale of New York. The author herself ran a competition on Twitter – I’ve alluded to the wonders of social networking in an earlier post – and, just before Christmas, it arrived, together with a lovely card and some yummy chocolate, which I think ought…
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…
Through the power of social networking, I was recently asked to write a review for Canongate’s wonderful Meet at the Gate website. They are currently running a feature they’ve dubbed their Literature World Tour and when they posted on Facebook that their next stop would be New Zealand,
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.