Neil Evans

Great story telling, Daeds, congratulations.

Coming to this late…but hugs to both Hil and Janette… Agents can be beetles at times, can’t they? Fill us full of hope and then dash us down. We are stronger than they think though – we get back up and live to fight another day, and keep writing, whatever they say.
Hil, your writing is gorgeous, and you have deservedly got agent interest.…[Read more]

Fab news, Daeds, x

Fantastic news. A great story. Very thoughtful and moving.

Another interesting blog, Richard, thank you.

How astonishing that an event with so much loss of life has faded from memory. I mean, not literally, it’s still there in the records – and you’ve just blogged about it. That said, it’s coming up to 70 years, I suppose. Great blog as ever, Richard. I shake my head when you write about the prevarication and penny-pinching over AWS. Then I remember…[Read more]

Thank you Raine. Yes it turned out to be a pretty cunning ploy.

Wow, thanks Libby! Well done to the other participants. I’ll think up some devilishly difficult competition for March and post later tomorrow.

Incidentally, as this year I am coasting towards the age where I am ‘losing my hair’, and wondering whether I will be locked out at quarter to three (never mind getting a bottle of wine for my birthday or a Valentine’s card), I suppose I should resign myself to joining that league of elderly no-hopers that includes Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman…[Read more]

I sort of worry a bit when I see agents pushing writers this way. In fact, my hackles start to hack or rise or whatever they’d do if I had them. Book Club fiction is Literary Fiction that agents reckon they should be able to sell better than average. As for this splitting of work into ever more categories as though this is some kind of scientific…[Read more]

Of course, I hadn’t fully considered how many cases there are until I started this. For instance, I read We Need to Talk About Kevin long before I knew anything about Lionel Shriver – possibly before she had begun the process of disseminating her curious bag of libertarian views* across the media and the web. I still consider it a beautifully…[Read more]

New Day

The smoke from cooking fires lay like a grey blanket over Alexandra township and a tangerine sun rose behind it, then burst clear and threw its warming mantle over the land. The windows of the high-rise buildings on the distant Johannesburg skyline glinted like slabs of molten gold. A typical autumn dawn on the highveld but this was not a…[Read more]

One of the more bizarre aspects of Social Media is that Michael Rosen has indeed been labeled as an antisemite, and the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. In fact, just a couple of months after the publication of his book The Missing: The True Story of My Family in World War II, which investigates the loss of family members in the holocaust, Rachel Riley lumped…[Read more]

You are not A BAD HUMAN BEING in spite of your assertion, and I have to point out that I am never wrong about these things. I note what you say, that I have no evidence other than a few sensational articles to confirm the smears, and most of all that he has been forgiven by Michael Rosen* He stays in my blog but with an amended text. I would love…[Read more]

There are also examples in art – Paul Gauguin, Picasso and Freud, for example, were not particularly nice folk, it seems.
If a writer’s work doesn’t reflect his obnoxious views, does that make it OK? Or if his views are expressed in a work of fiction and not an educational piece?
Some very good people write fiction that contains extreme views, but…[Read more]

No problem @Libby, it was a flippant remark on my part, not intended to be taken seriously.