Historical fiction: making the past feel real

An old man lives at the bottom of my garden. His name is Robert Barkus, or Bakehouse, or Bagust. Nobody is quite sure. But I often sense him around when I’m gardening, and I’ve found out a fair bit ab

In the first part of our examination of The Building Block of Dialogue, we looked at how to build a Scene of Dialogue. A Scene of Dialogue contains the elements which supplement the words spoken by th

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the

When the Fireflies Dance is set in Lahore, Pakistan and a significant challenge when writing it was to ensure the reader was able to place themselves in the setting. I wanted to be able to transport t

This month’s story, ‘The Surrogate’ by Tessa Hadley, is a study of two men through the eyes of one woman. The title suggests that one man is a surrogate for the other, but is it as simple as that? As

The first five pages of my new novel, Small Acts of Resistance, a love story set during the First World War, have taken a somewhat circuitous route to print. Their journey into being started over twen