Authors Electric

I could begin with an apology – almost as soon as I posted my blog last month I was swept into a family crisis which plot-twisted into a broken leg and a week in hospital, a poorly-thought-out chapter which finished only the night before my partner was due to be admitted (to the same ward) for spinal surgery. Since then there has been no need to watch any episodes of Holtby City , Casualty or even re-runs of Emergency Ward 10 . Instead we sit around in our double bed trying to keep warm - rather like the elderly grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory . (I really ought to be knitting nightcaps now I've completed my essential toe-cosy.) So I didn’t manage the follow-up correspondence that is one of the pleasures of blog-writing. Apologies especially to Enid Richemont who asked a question and never got an answer. Or I could begin with congratulations – to former Authors Electric blogger Nicola Morgan who has re-published her first novel Mondays are Red to widespread att...

I once read a book by Gwyn Thomas called The World Cannot Hear You. I can’t f o r the life of me remember much about it (except that I loved it), but the title has always lurked in my mind. I t seemed to me to epitomise the writer’s (or writers’) tragedy. You write, or read, these wonderful books, somebody reads them, or maybe not, and then they are gone. I used to drone on about Gerald Kersh, whom I thought was fantastic. Nobody else had ever heard of him, which I bitterly resented, more on his behalf than my own. Before and during World WarII he was enormous. And now…? But sometimes, out of the blue, things get jogged. My phone rang not so long ago , and I was asked to take part in a Radio 4 programme about the writers considered to be in the van of the “new realism” in children’s books. My Mate Shofiq was mentioned, and Albes on and the Germans. Good God, I thought - I wrote them! And suddenly remembered being rung up by the headmaster of a school in Peckham to cancel my invitatio...