What a writer does and doesn’t do all day

Ruth HartleyArt Process, Book Publishing, Books by Ruth Hartley, Education, Imagination, Music, Promotion, Reading, Writing Process1 Comment

All beginnings are hard – just look at the time already! It’s a good morning’s work when I sit down at my laptop in my pyjamas, before breakfast, ignore my husband, begin at once to write, and then carry on for hours. There were many a good night’s work done when, as a single woman, I wrote after supper, then […]

Géraldine de Haan Photographer: ‘Along the way’

Ruth HartleyArt Process, Family, Imagination, Photography, Visual ArtsLeave a Comment

Géraldine De Haan, photographer and friend I’m lucky to know Géraldine. She is an extraordinary photographer and a stalwart friend. She works tirelessly and quietly at her own photography, but is essential to the Quinzaine de l’Image organised by Peleyre Association and John Eden. She also curates art exhibitions brilliantly. I know. She helped me with my Corpus exhibition at […]

The Infinite Improbability of Satire – Tanvir Bush, author of CULL & guest blogger

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Imagination5 Comments

A writer reflects on her love of satire, and of Douglas Adams’s ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ ‘There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that […]

Never judge a book by its cover but please buy mine!

Ruth Hartley Storytelling, Book Publishing, Books by Ruth Hartley, Festival, Illustration, Imagination, Promotion, Reading, The Shaping of Water, The Tin Heart Gold Mine, The White and Black Blues, Writing Process2 Comments

Book Cover design                   Dear Friends and dear Readers I have great need of your help. This year I will be publishing my new book The Love and Wisdom Crimes. Its a book that has been 53 years in the making and 20 years in the writing. Next year I will publish […]

Mythological me – images from a memoir of childhood

Ruth HartleyColonialism, Family, Imagination, Memoir, Race, Southern Africa6 Comments

For a child, facts are fantastical and fantasy, factual Somewhere in my infancy, there is a thick green privet hedge, clipped and trimmed to right-angled perfection. It encloses a perfectly square empty space brimful of desolation. It contains no house, no people live there and it is nameless. Its eternal position is located somewhere inside the fortnight when my mythical […]