Category: Uncategorized
Professor! Professor!
Please excuse the slightly attention-grabbing headline, but here’s a link to a lovely profile of me written by one of my students for the Daily Q News website. It covers my inspirations, some of my adventures in China and the Middle East, the tricky process of transforming strange ideas into books, and of course a […]
The Other Shore
I’m delighted to announce that my latest poetry pamphlet is now out. It’s called The Other Shore, and it’s been published by Eyewear Press. Quite a few people have asked me about the title already. It comes from a Buddhist parable I first heard when I was travelling in China, about a man who journeys along […]
#5MinuteStories: Whale
Have you ever wondered what might be hiding in the dark? Are there some limits to human knowledge that we can never bridge? This week’s free story is about how far we might see. It’s also about those strange and majestic creatures that rule the ocean: whales. From the legends of the earliest books, to […]
Writing Process Blog Tour
Robert Sharp tagged me in the Writing Process Blog Tour, a carousel ride of writing answering a few short questions about their creative process. For Robert’s own great advice about swapping filler for fun, please check out his website. What am I working on? I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel – […]
How often do you travel through time?
Be honest. Time-travel can be something of a guilty pleasure. Guilty because so many well-meaning slogans tell us to ‘live in the present’ and to ‘seize the moment’, and yet there is something about slipping backwards and forwards in time that most of us cannot resist. We take comfort in childhood memories, in reliving perfect […]
Calling all writers!
Where do you get your inspiration from? I recently published a short story called Papercuts and Curses on Medium. For that story I used an image from the Harriet Bennett photo album (though many people have since told me that the man in the picture looks just like me). The owner of these evocative Victorian […]
All the way to Brazil…
My novel, Under Fishbone Clouds, is out this month in Brazil! Its being published by the wonderful people at Paz E Terra, and has been translated into Portuguese as O Deus e o Imperador, which means The God and The Emperor. It’s a great title – I’ve been told before, especially by Chinese readers, about […]