Flush Fiction

The coming of age novel is one of our most popular and powerful literary genres. From The History of Tom Jones to Twilight, The Catcher in the …

3 ways to celebrate the future of books

Do you love to talk about publishing innovation but realise that you behaviour as a reader has barely changed? Are you truly creating, or …

My life in twelve books

Last week, a colleague of mine asked if I would participate in a Pinterview (a Pinterest interview. Don’t judge.) called ‘My …

Close Encounters of the Word Kind

This Christmas, I bought my mother-in-law a Smythson ‘Book Notes’ journal: 128 leaves of gilt-edged, pale blue featherweight paper bound …

Forget Little Women; embrace real heroines

Did you know that Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm - not to mention twenty-four other novels, three volumes of short stories, …

Explore new horizons at the South Asian Literature Festival

When you sit down for a bedtime recitation Grimm’s Fairy Tales, do you realize that many of those weird and wonderful folk tales have their origins …

James Bond: Trash or Art?

Indulge me in a little exercise. Open a new tab on your browser, enter Amazon.co.uk and type ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ into the search …

Writers’ rooms

Why do I have such an enduring fascination with seeing the places that writers write? Forget overblown S&M; Fifty Shades …

Why happy amateurs win

“I got up at 7.30 and wrote for an hour before I got on my train. I wrote on the train for two and a …

The luxury of a one-gulp read

Last Friday, I spent eight hours reading The Great Gatsby – in Soho, in the dark, along with six hundred or so other skiving bibliophiles. This extraordinary …

Is gender dividing the digital publishing industry?

Last Friday morning, an eager audience of aspiring authors, editors, agents and publishers sat gripping cups of strong coffee and gazing upon a veritable smorgasbord …

Anne Tyler: Literary Heroine

The aim of Bookdiva is to bring women who love books together, and highlight books that women might want to read.

I’ve written before about …

Is romantic fiction undervalued?

lt would be all too easy to satirise the Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards (RoNAs). When I’d traipsed through central London to One Whitehall Place – …

Sport stories

If you were searching for a pastime that was the opposite of reading, you might well hit on sport. Burying your nose in a book …

Literary Resolutions

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions”, wrote Mark Twain in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise on January 1, 1863. “Next week you can …