Authors Electric

The winner of the nationwide school magazine competition, 1960 I have just read Let’s do It: The authorised biography of Victoria Wood , by Jasper Rees. This is a long book, because it details just about everything she ever wrote and performed. And even though I’d heard and seen so much of it before, I still found myself laughing out loud at her extraordinary inventiveness and wit. Her work ethic was phenomenal – she often wrote all night to fulfil a deadline, but she also expected everyone else to be just as dedicated. Her dialogue had to be spoken exactly as she wrote it, no improvising, and she had a go at most forms of writing. She was a terrific musician, and played the trumpet as well as the piano. I think the most autobiographical sketch of all was the one about Chrissy, the 14-year-old schoolgirl who sets out to swim the channel. Her parents are interviewed about the forthcoming ordeal, and it is assumed they will be in the support boat – however, they’re planning on a day out,...

It's midsummer, although you wouldn't know it from the weather as I write this (Spain is apparently sending us storms). So rather than yet another summer solstice blog post, I've been thinking about where we might be if you view the publishing industry as a single year. It goes something like this: JANUARY: Stone Age ~ 40,000 - 10,000 BC We live in caves. People tell stories around the campfire at night. Nobody writes them down but somebody might illustrate the most exciting ones on the cave walls. (January is a long, dark month.) telling stories around the campfire (Emeldil, CC*) FEBRUARY: Pyramid Age ~ 4,000 - 2,500 BC Europeans are still living in caves, but in Egypt they are building pyramids. Priests decorate the walls of their temples with religious texts in hieroglyphs, while further east in Mesopotamia people are writing similar texts on clay tablets using a clever pen-press language called cuneiform. Bestseller: The Book of Coming Forth by Day (Ancient...

Most of us have teachers who remain in our memories for one reason or another. I have two very different ones, who both had a powerful effect on my writing.             I was an only child, and my parents were the same age as everyone else’s grandparents. We moved house several times, too, so I frequently had to try and fit into a new school with some clear disadvantages. My father was Polish, so no one could pronounce my surname, let alone spell Krzewinski. He’d been a headmaster, and so had strong views on teaching, but no idea of the British education system. In Poland, teachers were revered and their word was law. And on the whole, if they were anything like my dad, they had the interests of the child at heart. I was also left-handed, which was still viewed as a bit odd, and I was small for my age which, with a July birthday, wasn’t ideal. In addition to all this I was particularly good at art and English, and hopeless at s...