Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

I'm lucky to have the sort of mother who never throws things out - at least, not things her children have made, no matter how long ago...

What makes a writer choose one subject over another, one genre over another?  What draws one writer to contemporary fiction, another to his...

I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t writing. My mother wrote; my grandmother wrote: it always seemed an occupation as natural a...

In Chaucer’s time, the word for a poet or author was ‘a maker’ - as witness the Scots poet William Dunbar’s luminous ‘Lament for the Make...

Will you all excuse me today if I  indulge in a little fanfare?  Because this is the publication day in America of my book 'The Shadow H...

If you are a writer, have you ever kept a diary?  I'm guessing you have. I started one when I was nine. “Mrs Butler’s school,” runs ...

I was sitting in my upstairs writing room (the tiny spare bedroom) when I saw one of our cats – the black one with the white shirt-front ...