This was the original opening chapter to Wrestliana. I think it was the hardest bit to leave out. If the family portrait is to be trusted, I and my two younger sisters – one fair and one dark – are the human offspring of a Giant and a Witch. I mean, don’t we […]
This is my all-time favourite image of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. It’s a great photograph, apart from anything else. And a great sports photograph. It was taken in 2015 by Jill Robson, who attends most of the summer agricultural fairs (Grasmere, Ambleside, Penrith) where this kind of wrestling traditionally takes place. Apart from the rain, […]
This is the original Wrestliana – my great-great-great grandfather’s history of wrestling (as the oldest and greatest sport in the world) Two shillings and sixpence is what it would have cost you in 1823. In 2018, a first edition will cost you around £800. If you can find one. It’s still available print-on-demand – […]
[This is a different version of the first chapter of the book – currently up on the Galley Beggar website.] The story of my great-great-great grandfather’s life is the best true story I know. It has everything – a strong, handsome, charismatic, tragic lead man (William Litt). It involves crime, disloyalty, poetry, love. It’s a […]
When I was looking for a publisher for my non-fiction book, Wrestliana, I put together this poster. It’s based on the posters that Cumberland & Westmoreland wrestling matches used to be advertised with in the early 1800s. That’s when my great-great-grandfather William Litt was doing his best wrestling. More about him next time. I did […]
What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness? The podcast from the third Friday evening event, which took place on Friday 12th May 2017, can be listened to here: https://birkbeck.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=c5377e27-5648-4bae-afe6-0b3e2d5b2072 Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan and Professor Rodrigo A. Bressan discuss Creative Writing and Mental […]
Here is what’s been happening. Mutants, the book of Selected Essays I have been working on (without always realising it) for sixteen years, is out. It can be bought from The Hive. It was published by the wonderful Seagull Books, Calcutta, who also published Life-Like. The editor was Naveen Kishore. I’m extremely grateful he gave me the […]
This talk was first delivered to students of the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck on May 3rd 2016. Leicester City won the Premier League, and since then a great deal of the national conversation – online, in newspapers, in corridors – has been, ‘How did they do it?’ The next thing after that, of course, is, […]
[This interview was conducted, the fax says, 21 Sep 2000 at 10:05.] TL: In Curriculum Vitae you say, ‘It seemed to me that the Comforters of Job were not at all distinct characters; they were very much of one type. They were, in fact, like modern interrogators who come to interview and mock the victim […]
I wrote this on 12th July 1995, if the date in the file is credible. At one point I called it ‘My Simplest Story’. At another (until about two minutes ago) I called it ‘My Russian Story’. But, for the moment, let’s just call it – A Village Story One day a man, a farmer, […]
