Authors Electric

"Mama for this month's post my paintings ok?" I got this sudden WhatsApp text one evening, earlier this month. It was sent from my dad's phone. The sender was in the drawing room and I was in the bedroom - a mighty distance of ----- meters separating us!   This is her latest excitement: sending me texts from a different room, using Baba's phone - "I am hungry"; "When will you have your tea"?; "How am I looking here (in a selfie)"? Since I am trying to restrict her screen time on my mobile, she has now caught hold of Baba’s. It actually works out far better for her: since he doesn't know what to do with it beyond phone calls, she has all the space in the world for taking selfies and typing texts to her heart's content.   I don't indulge this habit of hers a lot, but it was a commission I couldn't ignore, especially as it was made way in advance! What follows is a photo essay of the artist's latest creatio...

There’s nothing like starting the new year with a new enthusiasm, interest, hobby, craze, obsession – whatever you care to call it. You may remember that my last month’s Authors Electric piece came from Vancouver, British Columbia, where I was having a wonderful stay with my daughter Em. Rather than generally continuing to rave about Vancouver this month – something I could very easily do – I will home in on a discovery I made on an earlier visit, which grabbed me even more tightly this time. Emily Carr. No, not my daughter Emily, though I sometimes wonder why so many of my favourite people have the name ‘Emily’. There’s Emily Bront ë , of course, and Emily Dickinson. My dear grandmother was called Emily, which is partly why my daughter has that name. And now a new Emily joins my list. Some of you may well know Emily Carr and her work better than I do, but for those who don’t, she was a British Columbian artist, born in Victoria, Vancouver Island, who worked in the first ha...

When you write with a strong sense of place, as I think I often do, there are some settings which prove to be more inspirational than others. You just can’t leave them alone. They gnaw away at you and you feel compelled to write about them in different ways. For years, I’ve written about the small Scottish island of Gigha, off the Kintyre Peninsula, a place I know well and love dearly. I’ve set several radio plays and a novel called The Curiosity Cabinet on a fictional Scottish island called Garve, which is like Gigha in size and appearance, although not in location. God’s Islanders is a detailed popular history of the real place and its people from prehistoric times to the present day and now I’ve set my new novel, Bird of Passage, on a vaguely similar (but this time unnamed) Scottish island, although the landscape focuses on a single hilltop farm called Dunshee and a tree-shrouded ‘big house’ called Ealachan, nearby. The novel shifts between the two locations, with oc...