I have been included in a recently published video wiki “Authors Penning Books Both Humorous And Touching“.
Founded in 2011, Ezvid Wiki was the world’s first video wiki, and is now among the top 3,000 websites in the United States and their YouTube channel has nearly 600,000 subscribers, with over 325 million views since founding.
This is a short video I made for BBC Radio to help budding writers out there. It includes my advice on best writing books and where to begin. I hope you enjoy it.
To Garth Greenwell, the huge international success of his debut What Belongs to You, “was the biggest surprise of my life”, and he feels “immensely lucky” as “the success of a book has as much to do with chance as anything else”. Its success has allowed him to have a career as a writer and teacher in a way he wasn’t able to in his previous 20 years of writing. He feels relieved, though, that the writing process itself, “the struggle”, just him alone with his notebook and “the pit of doubt and despair”, hasn’t changed. “I wouldn’t know who I would be without it.”
You can read my interview with him about his new novel, Cleanness, in The Irish Times.
Sarah Perry – David Lammy – Robert Webb – Maya Goodfellow – Stanley Donwood Nikesh Shukla – Lola Olufemi – Paul McVeigh – Intisar Khanani – Max Porter – Pip Adam – Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett – Will Harris – Jasbinder Bilan
and many more…
I’ll be taking part in this wonderful festival. Here’s some information for their site…
BookBound 2020 is a new, not-for-profit literary festival, bringing authors and book-lovers together online for 7 days of exciting events, including readings, story-times and live author-to-author conversations.
While the majority of BookBound 2020’s team is based in the UK, the festival’s mission is to make connections and support new voices in Britain and around the world.
Proudly partnered with Wasafiri Magazine, BookBound 2020 offers a global platform for big names, emerging authors and all lovers of literature to come together during this period of international uncertainty and isolation.
Throughout the festival period, speakers will be championing their favourite independent bookshops, and encouraging remote support for the industry while COVID-19 restrictions remain in place. Viewers will also be able to help their local bookshops through a special arrangement between BookBound 2020 and the online bookseller Hive.
The full festival programme will take place online, and will cost nothing to view. All we ask is for those tuning in to consider making a donation, however small, to Mind, our chosen charity, to help support the essential work they do for those experiencing mental health issues.
About Wasafiri Magazine
For three decades, Wasafiri has encouraged readers and writers to travel the world via the word.
As Britain’s leading magazine of international contemporary literature, Wasafiri is committed to discovering, supporting and promoting the full breadth of literary voices from all points across the globe. The magazine has provided a platform for thousands of writers to date, many of whom were struggling to be heard at the outset of their careers and have now gone on to great things.
In the past ten years, the magazine has discovered and supported a raft of rising talents including Forward Prize winners Kayo Chingonyi and Vahni Capildeo, Women’s Prize winner Kamila Shamsie, Caine Prize winner Makena Onjerika, and 2019 Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo.
BookBound 2020 is proud to have Wasafiri as its partner.
Keep tuned for further info.
I’m not one for talking about my personal life online – that’s another story – but on occasion something smashes that self-made separation.
Recently, it was the first year anniversary of my mother’s passing. Not long after came the news that an old friend’s mother had died, a woman I had felt very close to over the last 30 years.
This was followed soon by my mother’s birthday and then by Mother’s Day. All in a matter of weeks. It seemed mothers were in my air. My atmosphere. It was hard.
On Mother’s Day, I woke and decided to walk up Cave Hill. I thought. I came back and cooked a rare Mother’s Usual Sunday Roast for one. I opened the wine before one. I played Doris Day. I sang loudly. For hours. I sang for my mum. I sang in celebration. I sang in remembrance. I sang because of her. I sang in defiance of my neighbours. I sang in vanity. I sang, as the saying goes, my heart out. There were not a few tears.
I woke to two messages on Monday morning. Both talked about my story Tickles, written in 2014, before my novel came out, aired again, without my knowledge, on Mother’s Day. The story is about a man visiting his mother in a home. She has dementia. She hugs him and won’t let him go. In that forced fit, he time-travels (we call it remembering), and finds that, although she is the one with the disease that dissolves time and memories, he is the one that had forgotten, the key to understanding the fracture in their relationship. There is pain, there is remembering and then healing.
I don’t believe in God. I believe in little that has not been in front of my eyes, at some point, and I’d have included that which fuzzes in the corner but disappears in full gaze.
Do you believe in coincidences? Do I? What is it I just felt? Is it a thing people call God?
Here is something I wrote. You can hear it for the next month.
“Are you a new or emerging writer from a working class background? Would you like to be published alongside an Impac Award-winner, a Booker Prize-winner, two Sunday Times Short Story Award-winners, a senator, playwrights and poets? What about a professional development programme with the help of leading publishers and the Irish Writers Centre.”
Read all about it in my article in The Irish Times.
