Meeting & greeting

We tend to imagine our literary icons in ivory towers – poised, thoughtful, wrapped in something muted and cashmere, tapping away at sleek laptops. Perhaps it’s how you picture yourself when attemptin

Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

Life has a bad habit of mirroring art. Sometimes, this can be in a deeply sad way. A while after I wrote about the assumption of guilt in a traumatised young woman with poor social skills, I watched a

L If they’re ever looking to recruit spies, forget handsome, fit, blue-eyed Bonds. Forget gym-buffed Daniel, impossibly good-looking Tom and danger magnet Matt. Look instead for a middle-aged woman in

It’s the cosy season of sitting down with a good book. Here, authors heading for Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival this month share their writing styles

I ’m projectile vomiting into a pool of light from my headtorch, the rest of the night reduced to strange noises and shadows in the jungle around me. I’m down to my last clean T-shirt, I can’t find my