Authors Electric

by Bill Kirton One of my slush piles My earliest ‘publications’ were parodies, written as school exercises and put into the school magazine by a teacher, so I suppose from the start I was something of a prostitute when it came to style or genre. In other words, I was anybody’s and wrote whatever the style demanded. I still love parody and I think we learn lots from trying to write like others – not all the time, of course, but as occasional writing exercises. As a teenager, I wrote poetry – truly awful stuff about love, broken hearts, lust and all that time-wasting but so painfully-felt angst. But my first real genre, when I began to realise that writing was what I wanted to do, was drama. I wrote stage plays for adults and children. My first real taste of ‘being a writer’, though, was when the BBC accepted one of my radio plays. They broadcast several more, mostly serious, dramatic stuff, but some comedy too and finally, skits and songs for revues. Those days, I was prai...

I'm into a trio of print books at present, all borrowed from the Barbican Library. THE STORY OF MR SOMMER, a short, beautifully written/translated novel by Patrick Suskind, with exquisite illustrations by Sempe was both moving and haunting - just one of those books you can't forget. Jeanette Winterson's fantasy based on Noah and the flood makes an amusing contrast, and I have yet to savour the third - JUSTINE, by Alice Thompson... I've already dipped into its descriptions though - the sort of lavish and visual poetic prose I lap up. There is a difficult-to-define difference between reading on my Kindle and reading a print book. All three print books are paperbacks, and so have rather springy pages which is annoying for breakfast reading - one hand on the coffee mug and the other on the book. There's also a subtle difference for me, as a writer, between reading/working on screen, and reading my eventual print-outs, and I do wonder if there is a similar one for p...