Authors Electric

We live in dangerous times. Not that you need telling - unless you’ve decided that the news is just too terrible to watch any more. I know someone who rations her news-watching to once a day, as she finds it too distressing. I get that - if we allow ourselves to think about the full horror of everything that is going on (not just here in the west but all over the world) we can easily by paralysed by it. But where does that leave us as writers? I present this as a dilemma - I have no solutions. For if we are going to write about the fires and the terrorist attacks and the political shenanigans and the civil wars and floods and droughts … where do we begin? Is it possible to write about all this in a way that is new, and different, and enables the reader to think about things differently? Are there any new words for horror, or trauma, or tragedy? Is it possible to tell the story of one man or woman in the middle of all this and let that stand for all the others - when each stor...

As many of you know, I've been to Nepal. It was evident, within a few hours of my arrival, that many tourists have deserted Nepal. Talking with friends there, it seems that cancellations began the day after the earthquake. One big quake, it seems, is enough for most people to believe the country is shaken to the core - and will carry on shaking. While a few backpackers are making their way back, the big tour groups are still staying away. Without tourists - and their foreign money - Nepal cannot earn the income she needs to rebuild. 'It's the journalists' fault,' Ajay told me. 'They were here for two days, took plenty of pictures of the earthquake damage, and then left us to it. No one has come back, seen how things are now.' He's right - anyone who saw those images might think that the whole of Kathmandu was flattened. I took this picture from his balcony, looking over the rooftops of the city: Does this look flattened? Disasters make goo...