PUBLISHERS OF LITERARY FICTION SINCE 1983
This new Pope is very smart, but his charm will not be enough to fight secularism. “Who am I to judge?” is good tactics to take time, but in the end he will have to judge and say who is with us and who is against us. A religion is made of dogmas and is […]
I’ve always assumed I was a surrealist but recently I thought I had better double check. I might be wrong. Maybe I was something else. Perhaps I was an absurdist. Perhaps surrealists are always absurd but absurdists are not always surreal. There must be formal definitions. How could it be that I’d never investigated this […]
I have been taking a break from writing. Not because I have run out of ideas, or got ‘writers’ block’, or anything like that. It is because I went cycling. Normally, cycling is a good thing. It gets me away from the computer and out of the house. It keeps me fit (writing is an […]
People often come up to me and say ‘Robert Irwin, shopaholic, fashionista and party animal, how on earth do you find the time to write those extraordinary novels and where do you get your material from?’ I scratch my head and mumble something unhelpful, for after all I do not wish to confess that I […]
Between 2009 and 2012 I had to spend a lot of time, for family reasons, in Athens. The city has a crazed petrol-head energy about it that can be fun, but behind the scenes there’s pain. There always has been. In those years the economic crisis was starting to bite, into people’s hearts as well […]
So at last I have spurred myself into a state of readiness to write a blog about the art of writing. There sun is shining and a world of infinite possibilities lies before me in the form of a biro and a blank page. But actually a cup of coffee would be nice right now, […]
One question I’m often asked as a writer is what do I write with? Pen? Pencil? Laptop? A one-word answer would be the easiest, but the truth is that what writers really write with is themselves. Their minds, imagination, their particular way of looking at and seeing things, their sensitivity and perceptivity and vision. They […]
In the civilized West we are always quick to criticize societies where people are denied fundamental rights or persecuted for religious reasons. Sex discrimination, criminalisation of homosexuality, forced marriages, sexual mutilations are all practices we condemn, as well as all interferences of religion in the personal life of an individual. We all abhor the cruelty […]
With news out that the 85 wealthiest people own as much as half of the world’s population, even the IMF and George Osborne have woken up to the idea that vast disparities of wealth might not be sustainable. Is this just talk, or will those who run the ‘Market Farm’ we are all living in, […]
Taking a leak in old Baghdad One of the biggest problems for a historical novelist is language change; and the more distant your setting from the reader, the greater the challenge. If you are trying to mimic the authentic English of your period, then you can only go back as far as the mid-nineteenth century […]