Authors Electric

Rain, heavy cloud, mud, Omicron... So this is a picture post of happy memories connected with writing. This one is of my wonderful agent, Carolyn Whitaker, on the balcony of her house in Turkey, which I visited many times. We also went to Iceland together. She died in 2016, and I miss her more than I can say. A generous, funny, adventurous woman with the most incisive and down-to-earth mind I have ever encountered when it came to editing a manuscript. "Let's start with the first f--- on page thirteen." She had a speedboat at her place in Netley, and piloted it at terrifying speeds. She also owned racehorses, and I was there when she had a winner at Epsom. A total original, who was an enormous influence on me. I was very touched when she left me some money; I realised it was exactly the same amount she had earned off me in the previous twenty-five years.    This is a humming bird from the garden in Monteverde, Costa Rica, which was the initial setting for my fantasy The Di...

Tigers have played a big part in literature, from the factual in Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon to the literary in The Life of Pi , And then there’s the children’s market – Tigger, in Winnie the Pooh and Hobbes in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes . Tigers seem to be able to represent just about anything, from the Nazis in The Tiger who Came to Tea , to the dishonourable side of man – Shere Khan in The Jungle Books . And in some way they all retain their basic nature; Tigger exhibits tigerishness, but it is muted to the less threatening play of a kitten: Tigger said: “Excuse me, but there’s something climbing up your table,” and with one loud Worraworraworraworraworra he jumped at the end of the tablecloth, pulled it to the ground, wrapped himself up in it three times, rolled to the other end of the room, and, after a terrible struggle, got his head into the daylight again, and said cheerfully: “Have I won?”          ...