Authors Electric

It’s out! My latest poetry collection ALL THAT LIVES , CSI:Poetry of sex, death and pathology, is now on Kindle as an indie, only about £2, as well as in paperback from Red Squirrel Press. So if you fancy dipping a toe into poetry, check out the book, though strangely there is no Amazon category for ‘science poetry about the dying brain, together with funny erotic poetry about post-divorce dating’. Yes there’s dementia and the science of dying, but also humour and joy (much more of that, later!). It follows years of research working closely with neuroscientists, anatomists and pathologists, in various fascinating Writer in Residence posts. (US link here .) I’ve also put my much-acclaimed related poetry installation SLICING THE BRAIN, an AV animated text film exhibited across Europe, onto youtube, in particular so that readers of the book can see the innovative dwindling sequence THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING BRAIN in action. See it here , but in full screen and highest re...

Authors Electric's Jan Needle ‘Bash a burglar’ is the latest cry from the men and women who run our country, which raises some interesting questions for a man who’s just finished writing a thriller about a   violent robbery at a country house. I can’t imagine that even Theresa May or Christopher Grayling would have encouraged my innocent victims to have fought back against three bloody madmen, but who can tell? Maybe I should go back and do a re-write. At the very least the body count would go up. Hamlet, anyone? It does raise some interesting moral questions, though. In the past I’ve been accused by one MP of insulting his constituents by suggesting a certain sort of murder was even possible in a certain part of Manchester, and generally of making violence seem ‘almost normal’. But Mr Grayling’s exhortation seems far more likely to make things worse than anything I can do. If you indicate that it’s all right to attack people with ‘unreasonable force’ for breaking into...