Authors Electric

I'm in New Zealand at the moment, visiting relatives and friends and re-visiting much loved locations. It's a weird sensation being in a place where I've spent so much time over the years, but yet can never properly belong. There's a sense of both homecoming and exile. Janet Frame Janet Frame, one of New Zealand’s best-known writers, wrote that ‘All writers are exiles wherever they live . . . and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land.’*1  Perhaps this is because, as writers, we have to stand outside our own experience and look at it objectively in order to write about it. We're always trying to get back to the 'lost land', those moments experienced and gone, at the core of our imaginative lives. But many of us are also physical exiles. Few people live in the place where they were brought up and the moment you move away from your native territory and look at it from the outside things will never be the same again.  Your mind is alwa...

This week is the centenary of Norman Nicholson’s birth. ‘Norman who?’ I can hear people ask. I wonder how many of you recognised the name of the most celebrated Lake District poet after Wordsworth - a writer whose work has suffered undeserved neglect since he died in 1987?  I'm guessing very few. But, hopefully, all that is about to change. Today the BBC are broadcasting a documentary about his life on Radio 4, at 4.30pm.   'Provincial Pleasures' is narrated by Eric Robson (moonlighting from Gardener’s Question Time) and contributors include Melvyn Bragg, fellow biographer Grevel Lindop and myself. There are also going to be lots of activities defying the notorious Lakeland weather throughout January.  On his 100th birthday, the 8th, I’m going to be at a ‘party’ at Carlisle Library - where the speakers will include some of his surviving friends and relatives. Researching and writing an ‘Indie’ biography from start to finish has been an interesting - often challeng...

Just Published by The Book Mill No biographer should write anything for love - biographies are expensive to write and they promote the work and life of someone else, taking time and effort away from your own writing.  But, I've just spent two years of what little life I might have left writing about someone else, spending money on air fares, train tickets and hotel rooms which I will probably never get back.  I reckon I've probably spent the best part of £10,000, if you add in the permission fees and the printing costs.  Does that shock you? When I was approached by the Trustees of the Norman Nicholson literary estate, they (and I) hoped that the book would be funded by one of the big publishers.  Norman was one of the Faber poets and had been published as a prose author by Robert Hale and Penguin.  But publishing has changed massively in the last five years and there's been a seismic shift in attitude to literary biography. Unless there is some kind of m...

A few weeks after I had my second child, short on sleep and high on anxiety, I woke up one morning and when I opened my mouth to speak, found that only gibberish came out.  The link, between what I was saying in my brain and what came out of my mouth, was broken.  I was utterly terrified.  Exhaustion - the doctor said - what you need is sleep.  So, a couple of pills were swallowed, baby, feeding bottles, and toddler were handed over to a panicky 'What do I do now?' father, and then I slept for 14 hours straight, woke for a drink and then slept again.  The following morning, my voice was back in its normal place, the tongue articulating what the brain dictated.  But I've never forgotten what it was like not to be able to communicate. Since then, I've been a compulsive communicator.  And compulsive is the word.  In fact, there's a label for it and I think it ends in 'aholic', and has nothing to do with the amount of wine I drink (though, on the...

Spending time on social networking sites can take too much time from writing, so I try to keep it to a minimum.  It’s fine spending hours on Twitter and Blogger and Facebook promoting your work, but if you do too much of it, quite soon there won’t be any work to promote!  But I've recently found a new distraction that might just prove to be useful. Pinterest is one of the names that’s been coming up a lot recently and I’ve been ignoring it.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I took a look at a couple of authors who were using Pinterest and was intrigued and very impressed.  Linda Gillard uses it to promote her work and so does another Electric Author Catherine Czerkawska.   Catherine's boards are particularly stunning! I’ve been trying to find new ways to promote my recent novel The Sun’s Companion and it suddenly seemed to make sense to share all the images that were around me when I wrote it and which illustrate the story perfectly.  It’s set i...