This photograph was taken when I was three or four years old, and its location is almost certainly a sheep station somewhere in the red dirt country beyond Broken Hill.…
‘It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I’ve heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt…
I have been quiet on this blog for a longish while, and every so often I have remembered this with a ping of regret, even guilt. But then I have…
I have been an ardent fan of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and I always strive to write at least one Hopperesque moment into a novel. This involves putting one…
Words on a page make language visible. Even after years of reading, the magic does not diminish. I love books that include a note on the typeface, since almost every…
Some of my favourite writers are closely associated with particular landscapes. The two Williams (Trevor and Maxwell) are linked respectively with small towns in Ireland, and Lincoln, Illinois. Roddy Doyle…
With the wild weather this past weekend, I had to decide whether to pick my first crop of Queen of Night tulips. I have loved looking at them from the…
The desire for praise sinks its claws into us early. Swinging upside down on the monkey bars we squeal: Look! Look at me! With maturity, the squeals become less shrill…
‘No man is an island,’ wrote the poet Donne. And yet which man or woman is more island-like than the novelist? Hunkered down in an invisible world of their own…
Of all the buzz words around prose writing, style is the most elusive, the least often explained or understood. What is style? Who has it and who doesn’t? Can style be…
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