Andre Brink: A Fork in the Road

Andre Brink reads from his memoir tomorrow as part of the season of guest speakers at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.
‘It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen,’ writes Andre Brink, the South African novelist, scholar, and opponent of apartheid, of his Francophilia—or more precisely his [...]

Writing and the flowering of imagination

How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, [...]

Interregnum: Lessing, emotion and cats

The cats that crowded around our dining table in Istanbul were not as under-fed as you might expect from feral animals. (In Spain, for example, they are much less like house cats out for the night, as they are here, and more properly wild, desperate and subaltern in their emaciation.) A white, mangy, dirty looking [...]

Empathy and our homeless project

I never warmed to Alain de Botton. For a number of reasons: 1) his Essays on Love were, I felt, dressed up as more than they actually were, and I felt I could have done better; and 2) but then he actually did it—wrote the thing—and I had not; 3) everything else that followed was [...]

Ian Jack on tense and cherries

I have just had porridge for breakfast. I mixed it with a banana (Dominican Republic), a Clementine (Spain), some organic raisins (Kenya) and some almonds (also Spain). I sprinkled on some linseed (Canada) and some cinnamon (unspecified within the EU). I have no way of knowing where the oats came from, but as the bag [...]

Ian Jack on the unsteady British

A twitterishly short post as I wait for A to arrive by train in Oxford. I’ve read through half of Ian Jack’s collection of writings The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain and — at this point — the words of the unsteady, the unstable, the unhinged — are peeking out at me from the [...]

Writing destitution: some ideas

I’m involved in a new project to look at homelessness and destitution. The idea is to get a wide spectrum of writers either telling their own or retelling the stories of others, leading to a theatrical or film project, to update some of the ideas and emotions found in, say, Orwell’s Down and Out in [...]

In writing, don’t chase your themes

I’m off to see Peter Brook’s 11 and 12 in April at Northern Stage. On Radio 4 a few weeks ago, a fellow guest on Start the Week challenged Peter (and Lucy Prebble, the playwright behind the story of Enron) on how a writer could not be aware of the themes of her/his writing. Surely, [...]