For years I have had a post-it note stuck to my office computer monitor. A phrase jumped out from a book proof in my postbag one day and the idea seemed important enough to keep by my side as a reminder, so: LOVE IS THE SHAPING AXE I wrote in caps. My personal life at…
If I write this, before I know it I won’t be not-writing any more: I’ll be writing again. It’s been so long since I put words together into sentences and those sentences into something that isn’t a business email, I’ve become nervous of it – but right now it’s easy to be nervous of everything…
It has been six months now since I held my vintage Jean Rhys omnibus in my hands: the one that sits by my bed in Brooklyn. I left my battered childhood copies of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and my childhood copy of 101 Dalmatians there too: loving gifts from one home to another. Banned from…
“Who could have imagined this” we say, as we realise we won’t be hugging our fathers on Father’s Day. But isn’t it striking how badly we failed to imagine everything about the world of Covid-19? Even in February, as the news was filled with reports that thousands of people were falling sick and dying in…
So here we are, lying low to the wall, as John O’Donohue wrote in the poem that was read on Radio 4 last week: behind our windows, stirring slow pots of comforting things, eating more beans than usual, baking or planning to bake, holding our pets or our kids or our pillows close and watching,…
A couple of weeks ago at the Association of Authors’ Agents AGM, I stepped down from AAA Committee after six years, the latter two in the role of President. I am proud to have worked for a trade association whose value for its members is unquestionable. I am not referring to our informative or social…
When the news breaks that a publisher has paid a huge advance for a new or emerging author, it sends a message to the industry. It signifies that – despite excruciating pressures on retail and variable results for debut fiction in particular – publishers still believe that they know how to make and find great…
I called for an industry behavioural code back in January because it seemed to me that a written statement was the only sufficient and appropriate response to the results of The Bookseller’s survey into sexual harassment in the book trade. The books business is founded on shared beliefs: in the importance of free expression, the…
As book people shall we recognise that last year was an important year for storytelling? For personal storytelling, because 2017 was a year in which many people’s stories were spoken out loud or written down for the first time. I am referring of course to the accounts given by those who have suffered sexual harassment…
I keep a number of half-formed essays in the Drafts folder of my blog, adding to and weeding through my ideas every now and again. I have revisited none so often as this piece of writing about sadness, which has grown long and wild over the past two years and yet never blossomed into something…