Authors Electric

                                               Seventy-Five Years     “TWENTY-FOUR YEARS remind the tears of my eyes.” So wrote Dylan Thomas in 1938. He was, although he didn’t know it, only to live another fifteen years longer, before dying from acute alcohol poisoning in New York during a reading tour of his poems.   I first came to his poetry in 1966 when I was in Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool, recovering from a cartilage operation. There, as chance would have it, I fell in with a fellow patient, Alan, who spoke enthusiastically of Dylan Thomas and recommended that I read his poems. I duly did so, and my edition of his  Collected Poems 1934-1952  which I have beside me now is inscribed Peter Leyland Liverpool. 1967.   Now, as I begin my seventy sixth year it occurs to me reflexively that five of them have passed since the beginning o...

A recent article in the Guardian said research had shown that reading time spent on books has doubled in the lockdown. I am an avid reader and an auto/biographical narrative researcher in adult education, so I decided to examine the books I had been reading and whether they had helped me in any way to cope with the isolation the pandemic has caused The first, Apeirogon by Colum McCann, a biographical novel set in the midst of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, was long and challenging. Although it gave me lots to think about, it failed to take off and like its many-sided title left me with more questions than answers. The second, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, was better and it was surprisingly easy for me to be taken inside the mind of Tambudzai, a young girl in Zimbabwe, and to encounter her struggles with her uncle and her parents, and her friendship with her cousin, Nyasha, as she begins to find herself while the country is simultaneously freeing itself from colon...