One of my roles as your Blogger-in-UK-residence is to share any Good News about International writing on ‘our’ side of the Channel – and I’ve just been served up a large delicious helping of brain food which I want to share with you to give your new year a healthy start. Thanks to the gr
Germany is on my mind – it often is. A country that both fascinates and frustrates me, I lived there for nearly a decade, studied the language, as a BBC journalist witnessed some ‘major German events’ (Berlin Wall! Unification!) and today still spend a lot of my life thinking/reading/talking a
I’m smitten. Hay Cartagena has the greenest Green Room – a tropical garden of lush vegetation busting with flowers and fluorescent birds. Hay Cartagena has the brightest colours; its audiences are the best dressed and the most enthusiastic. It has the best music and most magical-realist margarit
It’s winter in London, ice on the ground. I’m wearing boots and gloves. Next week – so I imagine – I’ll be wearing summer dresses and sandals in Cartagena. I have this strong image of moving from the dark into the light. I’m used to attending Hay Festivals in the dark and in boots – [&
I am a very proud member of English PEN; I am also a huge supporter of PEN Atlas. So I’d like to devote my final Blog before Christmas and New Year – a time when we reflect on what’s good and bad about the world – to draw attention to PEN’s outstanding work on behalf […]
It’s that ‘Best Books Of The Year’ time again. Everyone who is Anyone in the Literary World is revealing their favorite reads of 2014. These lists are both exciting and depressing: all those books I’ve missed! All those books still to read! So, I’m going to depress and excite you too by re
