Posy Simmonds Posy Simmonds is a brilliant artist, acute satirist and eye-watering cartoonist who, in Literary Life Revisited, exposes authors, publishers and the book trade. Her work is currently on display in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has the essential gift of making you laugh at yourself. Funny Feminist Cartoons I became addicted to Posy Simmonds’s Mrs Weber’s Diary […]
Saving my stories
What are the risks to my stories Saving my stories required an agent, high-profile reviews, media links, book launches, hard work and lots of money. I had none of those and I had to save my stories myself. Publishers told me that if a book is not successfully marketed in the six months after publication, it will die. As a […]
The stories behind my stories
Right now, my stories are in danger of vanishing from the world. Does that matter? Ought I stop them from disappearing? Does anyone care, except me? This is how I often feel, as I know many authors do, after a long day of marketing discussions, or time spent following up with publishing and distribution contacts, rather than writing! My stories […]
Chinongwa Reviewed
Chinongwa by Lucy Mushita is a timeless story. It is beautifully written and an easy fluent read. An extraordinary book This is quite a statement to make about the story of a skinny, snotty nine-year-old girl child called Chinongwa who lives in a remote village in Zimbabwe as her family become subject to colonialism in the early 1900s. Fundamentally, however, […]
Freedom of Speech and truth-telling
The BBC Reith Lectures I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Reith Lecture on Freedom of Speech on the BBC and I knew I was once again in a world of curiosity and questioning where books are open doors to the whole world. As Adichie said, the essential freedom to be creative is only possible if there is freedom of speech. […]