Authors Electric

In August last year, I was right amid book launch mayhem for You Beneath Your Skin . Almost one year later, the world is irrevocably changed--there is a pre and post covid era, and we are all waiting for the shape of us when we emerge at the other end, when covid becomes a memory. Things are apparently not yet at their worst. Through it all, life has gone on, as it does. Last week, amid all the crazy anxiety for friends and family, I announced a piece of news that helped cheer us a little. Endemol Shine has optioned You Beneath Your Skin for TV screens, and the news emerged on Hollywood Deadline . This will hopefully take the book into new hands--and when the TV series gets made, I would get see my characters on screen. I'm equal parts excited and apprehensive, for obvious reasons, but it still makes for good news for the two nonprofits the book supports: Project WHY and Stop Acid Attacks . Meanwhile, the world still goes on. Everywhere I look, there's misery...

As I get older, I realise, as I’m sure we all do, that our biggest battles tend to be with ourselves. I am not going to run myself down ( I’ve given that up.) There are some things I do easily and well, but my kindest supporter would have to admit that I am not a person who keeps track of things I don't care about. I can rarely find a matching pair of socks, am as likely to have five new tubes of toothpaste as none and have run out of space for notebooks I never use. I am a restless kind of writer, inclined to get excited by something new only to abandon it for a better idea.          Anyway, the upshot of this character flaw is that I don't keep track of my own writing very efficiently. (Don't worry I am very efficient with other people's)   Last week, I found a whole cache of poems I'd forgotten I’d written and I’ve lost count of novels I have written but done nothing with, or ideas I have come up with but never worked on.      My mai...

I have been walking past this amazing suburban garden for decades, going back to the years when I walked my two children home from school (they have both been serious adults for a very long time!) It's constructed by using very closely packed containers which can be moved around, re-arranged - so simple and so clever. In all that time, I have never encountered the gardener - of such tiny mysteries Alan Bennett monologues are made (if you've never heard of him, do Google him - he's well worth the effort.) Stories, like "A Lady of Letters", narrated in a beautifully crafted stream of consciousness by unremarkable people - people we mightn't want to share time with because they're so conventional and boring, people we'd pass un-noticed in the street - until something suddenly jars, something suddenly shocks. As a recent critic described reading these stories or listening to the monologues, it's like being on a night sleeper which chugs along peacef...

On June 4 th Call Me Joe by Martin Van Es and myself was published simultaneously in the UK and the Netherlands. The bookshops, still closed in the UK, were just opening in Holland, which led to the book being stocked in 550 outlets and to a re-print of the Dutch edition before it had even hit the streets. Two weeks later it was number one in Hebban's charts. In the UK a generous marketing budget meant that a four-page promotion for the book was wrapped around the Bookseller on June 12 th , a promotional animation went up on the internet the following week and reviews started to trickle in from the blog tour. The reactions were good, some of them more than good, and one of the main reasons people said they liked it was because Martin gives some actual suggestions on what we could do to clear up the mess that mankind seems to have got themselves into. When there is so much turmoil and anxiety about the future, people are finding it refreshing to read concr...

"Mama for this month's post my paintings ok?" I got this sudden WhatsApp text one evening, earlier this month. It was sent from my dad's phone. The sender was in the drawing room and I was in the bedroom - a mighty distance of ----- meters separating us!   This is her latest excitement: sending me texts from a different room, using Baba's phone - "I am hungry"; "When will you have your tea"?; "How am I looking here (in a selfie)"? Since I am trying to restrict her screen time on my mobile, she has now caught hold of Baba’s. It actually works out far better for her: since he doesn't know what to do with it beyond phone calls, she has all the space in the world for taking selfies and typing texts to her heart's content.   I don't indulge this habit of hers a lot, but it was a commission I couldn't ignore, especially as it was made way in advance! What follows is a photo essay of the artist's latest creatio...