To an Anglophone audience Pascal Bruckner is most likely to be known through the Roman Polanski film Bitter Moon (an adaption of his novel Lunes de Fiel), or for his left wing criticism of multiculturalism. I feel this is a shame. This is not because his political criticisms lack merit, but because one could easily […]

Who is your favourite recurring crime fiction hero/detective, and what is it you love about them? Regarding the roman noir heroes I am “romantic”. My preferred ones are Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the legendary characters  of Dashiell  Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s novels.  Both are dysfunctional beings, living in a corrupt and morally sick society, […]

A few weeks ago the $10,000 Read Russia Prize 2015 was won by Vladimir Sharov’s Before & During, translated by Oliver Ready and published in 2014 by Dedalus books. The novel beat new translations of novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; Sharov is a towering intellectual presence who stands comparison with these greats of Russian literature. […]

Our first commissioned translation was Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece I Malavoglia, translated by Judith Landry under the title of The House by the Medlar Tree in 1985. It is the kind of book I find irresistible, like the novels of Dickens, which appeal both to the heart and to the mind. Novels which fit into this […]

Jebel Marra, short stories, and writing war I used to work for a humanitarian aid agency in the UK, and in 2005 I spent six months working for the emergency relief effort in the centre of a war zone in Darfur, Sudan. It was my day (and night) job, unrelated to my writing, and I […]

What Became of the White Savage is based on a real-life incident. How did you find out about it and how did the character of Narcisse form in your mind? I first heard of this story when I was living in the South Pacific, in New Caledonia about twenty years ago. I don’t remember exactly […]

Round about the time that I became a teenager my father became an Orthodox priest. He would go out and about in all this priest’s regalia, black robes and black hat, beard like Rasputin, this massive eastern crucifix chained about his neck. You could see him a mile off. He looked like that even if […]

Writing Bristol I spent my youth roaming the hills and streets of Bristol. At the age of thirteen I was on roller skates at a break neck-speed to Redland, over Kingsdown, backwards down Park Street. Then I traded the skates for a push-bike which I ditched because I preferred walking. All over the city, from […]

King Crow came from a concrete incident and a concrete image. Regarding CAFE ASSASSIN I have a friend, who I’ve not seen for a while, also called Nick. At the time the story was forming in my head, I was seeing quite a bit of him. He was in a very dark place. He was […]

Whenever I was in trouble at school, which was a lot, my mum reminded me how lucky I was with the story of this girl she had taught in a residential unit, whose step-dad sold her to sailors from out the back of his van, which he parked up down the docks in Bristol, when […]