Authors Electric

          It is a huge honour to be speaking later this month at the inaugural London Author Fair , held on February 28th at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden.I will be running a workshop on how writers of all persuasions can learn from two of the areas in which poets lead the way - performing their work, and collaborating with people from other branches of the arts. (I will be talking about collaboration with artists and musicians. Expect more of the wonderful photography of my long-term collaborator Veronika von Volkova )           I was a novelist several years before I was a poet. And a headstrong and opinionated self-publishing novelist (at a time when it was very unfashionable to self-publish) to boot. I had also spent years drifting around the music and art worlds, where those strong opinions on what made a successful relationship with an audience fermented and distilled and pe...

          Today is National Flash Fiction Day . It would be fairly criminal of me not to state that from the outset. First off, this is the first time ever we’ve celebrated this marvellous form as a nation – the Arts Council have even got behind it. Second, tonight, as part of the shindig, we’re holding a flash slam in Oxford , combining the worlds of poetry slam and flash fiction as twelve of the UK’s finest practitioners battle it out, reading their stuff in front of an audience and celeb judge, the short fiction legend Tania Hershman. If you’re anywhere near Oxford, do come along to what will be a truly wonderful evening. And if you’re not, please do check out what’s going on in your area. Third, to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day, my two short fiction collections are free for today and tomorrow:           (life:) razorblades included contains some award-winning short stories and poe...

(I hope it's OK to sneak in an invitation. On July 28th I will be at Blackwell's in Oxford as part of a panel called "Rising Literary Stars" with Naomi Wood [The Godless Boys], Lee Rourke [The Canal], and Stuart Evers [Ten Stories About Smoking]. It would be lovely to say hello in person!) My wife keeps rats. Well, I absolutely adore them but they live in her study to keep them out of harm’s way of our 5 cats. When we were first looking around and doing our research, we went into a pet shop and there was a label on the massive rat cage saying “we like to live in groups.” I was sitting babysitting our two boys this morning whilst my wife cleaned out their cage, and thinking how this site is feeling more and more like a homely community, and how I have a rather long (as I’ll explain but not at length, don’t worry) history of writers’ groups , and how the very most exciting work seems to come from movements not individuals locked away in their turrets – Bloomsbury, The C...