Authors Electric

Well, I've finally managed to publish my Malawian travels on kindle (and other e-platforms). This has been a difficult book to write - wherever I went I met people eager to give me their opinions on the aid industry. And I went with First World assumptions about the importance of overseas aid and its role in changing the lives of those living in poverty - views I ended up questioning but finding no answers. And so I've left the reader with my unanswered questions. Should I have plucked solutions, rather than leave a reader uncomfortable? Or is it fine to present the challenges and leave the reader to think about them? This dilemma was part of the reason for choosing my title: Everlasting. 80% of the population of Malawi lives in poverty - and I could see no evidence of a co-ordinated of effort to challenge that. The big organisations don't seem to be trying to work themselves out of a job. At the same time, there are some magnificent, locally-driven projects that a...

I'm home from Malawi, and have begun the process of teasing stories out of the scribbles in my notebooks. For there are stories - of generous, welcoming people who spend three rainy months of the year working their socks off to grow food, and the rest of the time eking out whatever they have grown. There are stories of people starting schools under trees. There are stories of people trying to provide health care with no running water. There are stories off illegal logging and people trying to plant new trees. There are stories of aid agencies, with their baseline studies and conferences. There are stories of lions and hippos and fish eagles. So you can see why I might be struggling to shape this into some sort of coherence that can hold together in a narrative. Bear with me, I'll get there. Meanwhile, I think these three pictures illustrate something of my dilemmas. This is the M1, previously known as the Great North Road. It is the main road north from Lilongwe,...

When I started writing  Shambala Junction  in Amsterdam in 2009, I had no idea that there was a traumatised young man named Saroo Brierley. Oceans away from me in Australia, he was desperately searching satellite images on Google Earth, trying to find a way from Howrah railway station to the home he lost as a child in India.  I had angrily started to write my novel, tentatively titled  Finding Piya , after reading a short news article in an Indian community newspaper about babies for sale in India. The article described a flourishing trade in unscrupulous international adoptions operating out of India. Shambala Junctio n was published in 2016, after winning the Virginia Prize for Fiction in the UK. Also in 2016, the much-feted movie  Lion  opened in movie theaters worldwide   starring scene-stealer Sunny Pawar, as well as Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman.  Lion  is based on Brierley’s memoir ( A Long Way Home , 2013).  ...

I'm in Malawi - lucky me!  I'll try not to go on about the scenery or the weather (or the snakes and leopards ...) As ever, I scribble in my notebook all the time I am away. I filled one exercise book (narrow lined) in the first ten days I here. I notice as much as I can, the big things and the little things and the strange things, and I reflect on how I feel about them all. The plan, when I get home, is to go through all this twaddle and see if I can find a story. For instance: my guide is called Everlasting. Surely his name a story in itself. Lilongwe, the capital, is divided into sections each with a prescribed function and housing density. Those in low density areas live behind walls and security, with gardens and swimming pools, and shop in one of the new supermarkets. The high density areas are alive with markets and people and bicycles. Is this the story? I stayed in Luwawa, where there is a huge pine plantation (planted to feed for a paper mill but abandoned) a...