Writing from the discomfort zone
News Archive
The Duality of Frankenstein – Jonathan Squirrell
A fresh review of Kate Horsley’s Frankenstein sequel The Monster’s Wife. Many thanks to Jonathan Squirrell, an MA student on the creative writing strand at the University of Hull. An excess of grease stalls Ronald Frobisher’s career. The fictional writer in David Lodge’s Small World is visiting a plate glass university …
The Mystery of Briony Lodge – David Bagchi
Review by Jonathan Squirrell Cards on the table, Three Men in a Boat is my Bible. Actually, that’s not quite true. Jerome K. Jerome’s underappreciated masterpiece The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow is my scripture. I model myself on its title scrupulously. Three Men in a Boat is …
What have writers from the old Soviet bloc ever done for us?
In the late 20th century writers from the old Soviet bloc travelled at warp speed from communism into capitalism. What creativity comes out of that? I want to know. Orwell found Zamyatin’s We in 1945, more than 20 years after its appearance in Russian. He read the French translation, and …
Readers (inc. Helen Mort) on The Headscarf Revolutionaries
One thing has always been true of publishing: readers are its lifeblood. That fact now becomes clearer than ever. Book sections slim down, top-name authors share the few reviews between them, and the true marketing becomes readers word of mouth. It takes effort to read a book and share your response …
How to design a book cover
So how do you design a book cover? Here’s the striking new one for The Secret Baby Room by D.D. Johnston, & the story behind it. The first choice to be made in cover design, of course, is the basic one: find yourself a good designer. Publishing is a partnership. A writer starts …
Q&A with Kate Horsley
Author of The Monster’s Wife Kate Horsley tells us about her unusual background and how she created her debut novel, a rewriting of Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Why an author turned publisher, and how the economics of publishing plays out
A new publishing house bets against the future of brick and mortar bookstores
A Q&A with James Thornton, the author of SPHINX
Q: Your first novel Immediate Harm was a legal thriller with science fiction overtones – a virus jumping to humans from GM corn. Sphinx: The Second Coming is full-blown scifi. What drew you to the genre? JT: Since I was a boy, scifi has given me a place my mind …
From Creative Writing PhD to novel – Ectopia and Martin Goodman’s writing process
Q: You wrote Ectopia as a PhD. Why? Martin Goodman: I wrote complete drafts of the book before any Creative Writing PhD came into existence. They were sent out into the world by top agents like Mic Cheetham and Deborah Rogers, and kept coming back. I told Deborah to forget …
D.D.Johnston and the Creative Writing PhD from all sides – an audio discussion
Sunday morning, 9am (who thought of that?) 30th June 2013 saw Barbican Press author D.D.Johnston at Imperial College, London for a presentation on his new novel The Deconstruction of Professor Thrub at the Great Writing Conference. It was maybe a unique occasion – the passage of a novel through PhD Creative Writing process was captured in discussion …
Philip Gross on Creative Writing from universities- and us!
Philip Gross dons several hats. He’s winner of the T.S.Eliot Prize for poetry; writes terrific fiction for readers of any age who like to explore the young adult world; and he is the Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. He is also gracious enough to give Barbican …
