Funny old week, including a 37 hour journey with a thirteen hour time difference, several hours in A & E (the two may be related: got great care from a junior doctor on the eve of the strike, but not one bed was available) and a visit from China by my old friend Martin Stannard, a poet and critic of some renown, but far less renown than he deserves. He’s one of the most original, interesting, influential and entertaining poets the UK has produced in the last thirty odd years. I’ve been reading his stuff since 1988 and got to know him not long afterwards, due to his connection with John Harvey‘s Slow Dancer press. John brought him here to read and I got him…
I don’t have books of the year, as I don’t read books by year. I read a handful of new books, especially poetry, as soon as they come out but, mostly, they pile up. I buy hardbacks that I know I’ll want to hold onto (eg the new Frantzen and Elvis Costello’s autobiography), but their high price doesn’t include the biggest expense involved in a thorough read: my time. As often I’ll wait for the paperback to come out or buy it on Kindle when I see a good deal. I don’t like reading to feel like a duty (except when it is a duty because I’m marking it or reading for other professional reasons). And I like to be partially guided by serendipity. For…
We didn’t think we’d done it. And we were OK with that. The eighteen months we spent working on our bid to become a UNESCO city of literature made so many things happen that, in a way, we’d already won. We encouraged so much creativity and civic pride, engineered numerous events and several publications. The process of putting together the bid in itself helped the city’s literature scene to become more joined up. And we made a start on the biggest task of all, using Nottingham literature to improve the city’s literacy. But UNESCO accreditation – a permanent honour – is a big ask. We knew from the start that the odds were against us. We were told that UNESCO wanted to reach into continents…
Just listened to a wonderful Desert Island Discs with Lemn Sissay, who, at one point, talks about people deciding to ‘knit me a novel’. It got me thinking. Today, I want to tell you about the new Bone & Cane novel, published this year. I don’t want to dwell on why it’s a year or two late, largely due to the collapse of my old publisher and the need to find the right new one. Glasgow’s Freight Books have done an excellent job with it. Look at the great cover above. Instead, let me tell you about the different threads I knitted together to create this story, my most ambitious to date. It has three main time periods (and three smaller ones): the late ‘60s,…
As I’m typing this, Nottingham’s bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature is being electronically submitted to UNESCO UK, who, if they decide to support it, will send the bid to UNESCO’s director-general next week. On our City of Literature website we’ve published a long letter from the city’s great and good (University Vice-Chancellors, MPs, a rich array of civic and business leaders), demonstrating their support of the bid. It’s been a busy year, and a particularly hectic last few days, in which we rewrote the bid in the light of a helpful review of the initial draft from UNESCO UK. I’m proud of the the bid we’ve written, which, I believe, represents the city’s thriving literature scene and creative infrastructure in an…