writer
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Lifelong creativity and PD James’ tips for writers
God bless PD James! At the age of 93, she wants to write one more detective novel. Amazing. Let’s hope it will feature Adam Dalglish, the Scotland Yard detective who has been her hero since her very first novel, Cover Her Face, published in 1962. Last seen in The Private Patient, in 2008, it’s time… Read more
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Good old writers
Who says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from… Read more
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Martin Amis on life and Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis describes seeing his father, Kingsley Amis in a dream in his autobiography, Experience. Published in 2000, five years after his father’s death, it’s one of the most intimate accounts of a father-and-son relationship that I have ever read. He writes: Why should I tell the story of my life? I do it because… Read more
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Raffles Hotel, Chowringhee and Death In Venice
Singapore’s Raffles Hotel and the Bengali writer Sankar (real name Mani Shankar Mukherjee) both feature in Brick Lane author Monica Ali’s excellent essay on hotels and writers. The essay in the British magazine Prospect follows the publication of her hotel-based novel, In The Kitchen, which I am dying to read. Ali praises Sankar’s popular Bengali… Read more
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Naipaul’s seven rules for aspiring writers
VS Naipaul advised aspiring writers to practise what he had learnt from his father, says Patrick French in his biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. When the Indian website Tehelka asked Naipaul to suggest some rules for aspiring writers, this was the advice he gave: Do not write long sentences. A sentence… Read more
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Paul Theroux revisits Asia
Ghost Train To The Eastern Star by Paul Theroux Paul Theroux has written an immensely readable sequel to The Great Railway Bazaar, repeating that railway journey from Europe to Asia and back which earned him fame and fortune more than 30 years ago. It is bursting with people and places, rich in indelible portraits. I… Read more
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Marquez biographer talks about the author
Even those who have not read Gabriel Garcia Marquez will enjoy listening to The Strand, the BBC World Service arts and culture programme, where Gerald Martin tells Harriett Gilbert how he wrote Marquez’s biography. The 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature emerges as such a fascinating figure that one immediately wants to read him. The… Read more
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Sublime writing — like a movie
Amit Chaudhuri is one of the best Indian writers in English today. Salman Rushdie may be more flamboyant, but when it comes to describing a scene, Chaudhuri is second to none. He can be as vivid as a photograph or a video. The only reason he is not better known is his short stories and… Read more
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