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...