Category Archives: featured
Salway’s 100 Question Character Interview…
One of my favourite creative writing exercises is to have students create a character on the paper through a series of questions, and then get them – one by one – to pretend to be their character and submit to being interviewed by the rest of the group. It’s amazing what startling storylines can come [...]
Have you a poem lurking….?
There’s still time to enter the Kent & Sussex Open Poetry Competition, with over £1500 of prizes. The deadline may be extended a week, and we’d be very grateful for your support now. This is a difficult time for all arts organisations, and to be honest, competitions such as these are what are keeping many [...]
A sneak preview of my new cover….
Like it? The poetry collection will be out properly at the beginning of March – details of the party to come! But I know that some lovely people have pre-ordered it here and although I don’t know who you are unless you’ve contacted me direct for your ‘in-limbo’ postcard, thank you thank you thank you…! [...]
Five Sentences with … Peggy Riley
With all this talk about starting a novel, I’m very pleased to bring Peggy Riley to the blog to finish my five sentences. Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright living in Kent, and one of the reasons I was so keen to feature her is that, not only is she a fab writer you [...]
Announcing my Canterbury Laureate project
… a creative pilgrimage around Kent’s gardens. It’s been both a lovely and hard couple of months since the announcement that I was to be the next Canterbury Laureate. Lovely because of the people I’ve met, the literature I’ve read and have been sent, and the projects I’ve seen come into fruition, or which are [...]
Feeling Appreciated….
A lovely lovely review of Tell Me Everything and my other books here from the mighty Charles Lambert. It makes me so happy to have Tell Me Everything read – for all sorts of reasons I’m not sure, to be honest, how many people even realised it was out first time around. In fact, if [...]
Five Sentences with … Anthony McGowan
Today, it’s my GREAT pleasure to have Anthony McGowan on here to finish my sentences. Anthony’s latest book The Donut Diaries, has an unlikely hero… Dermot Milligan’s got problems. He’s overweight and hooked on donuts. He has a pushy, over-achieving mother, and a father who spends all his time hiding in the loo. His sisters, [...]
YOU DO NOT NEED ANOTHER SELF-HELP BOOK….
OH WAIT A MINUTE… You DO need this one!! Lovely things have been happening since I first announced my first poetry collection YOU DO NOT NEED ANOTHER SELF-HELP BOOK a little while ago. First of all Will Hermes, a senior critic at Rolling Stone Magazine and author of Love Goes To Buildings on Fire called [...]
It’s Big. It’s Beautiful. It could be YOUR Bookplan….
Anyone who is a writer, or works with writers, knows how important it is to really plan your book. Too often, and I know this to my cost, even a really great idea doesn’t have the stamina to carry on to the finish line. Well, hurrah, for YOUR BIG BEAUTIFUL BOOK PLAN, written by Danielle [...]
Five sentences with…. Tania Hershman
It’s a big excitement for me today to welcome Tania Hershman here to finish my sentences. And although it’s unlikely, I’m hoping that one reader at least doesn’t know Tania, so I can be the one to introduce you to her stories. They are wonderful. Polished jewels of poetry and thought. Here’s one of my [...]
