Authors Electric

Another distraction - view from my window as I type When I’m not writing my own books or not-very-successfully trying to promote them, my chief occupation is being an editor, proofreader and appraiser of other people’s work, and I must admit I love these things almost as much as I love doing my own writing. The processes are very different, however, and seem to use entirely different bits of my brain. It would be lovely to be able to do my own work in the mornings, for example, and work on other people’s books in the afternoons. I know some editors who do this, but for me it simply doesn’t work. It was the same with lecturing and research, in the days when I did those things. In UK universities, lecturers are expected to fit their original research into the gaps between all their various teaching commitments and administrative functions. There are exceptions in a few places, I believe, and perhaps for some who’ve achieved the dizzy heights of academic stardom, but on the who...

My visit was connected to the 2014 Felixstowe Book Festival Some months ago I was asked to work with some nine and ten year old ‘reluctant writers’ who were also doing an Anglo-Saxon history project. Could I help them use writing to enter imaginatively into the Anglo-Saxon world? My heart leapt! Decades ago, when I was at university, I’d been lucky enough to enrol on an immensely old-fashioned English literature degree. We started at the beginning, somewhere around the late 7 th century, and spent the next three years thundering on chronologically, until we collapsed exhausted somewhere between the First and Second World Wars. This was in the 1970s so we were only a generation or two from home. Many of us felt a little apprehensive when we were instructed to purchase our copies of the most recent edition of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader – initially published in 1876 when it was shockingly modern even to consider English literature as a subject for study. Our nervousness deepened...

Last month I started to count down my top ten books or series that have "stayed" with me (whatever that means) throughout my life . I may have bitten off more than I could reasonably swallow. It was a bit of an undertaking, and I only got through the first two. These books aren't going to read themselves, so let's cut the introductory fluff and get right to it then: 8. The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien As far as I'm concerned, these are the best covers ever bound. As a kid, I loved the Rankin/Bass cartoon version of The Hobbit . I watched it every time it came on television. This was so long before DVD's, mind you, that we didn't even have VHS yet. This is how we DVR'ed back when the world was young and dinosaurs ruled the earth. This meant that I could only watch it once a year if I were lucky, so for the weeks before it aired, I was the best behaved kid you ever saw. I'd eat all my vegetables and possibly ...