Instead of bringing you the best reads for summer, BookBlast® is bringing you the best reggae for summer.
Keith Anderson, known as Bob Andy, talks about his life and times in a rare and exclusive interview.
Best known in the UK for the track recorded with Marcia Griffiths “Young, Gifted and Black” (1970), he is widely regarded as “one of reggae’s most influential songwriters,” Wikipedia.
Maggie Gee was born to working-class parents, and climbed into an uneasy place between classes. She was educated at state schools, and won a major open scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford where she did an MA in English literature and an MLitt on Surrealism in England. She was one of the original Granta 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 1983.
Gee has published fifteen books, thirteen of which are novels, including her latest, which is published by Fentum Press, Blood. A new, extended and updated edition of her 2014 novel Virginia Woolf in Manhattan has just been published by Fentum in the US.
She is a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature, a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2012. She is a Non-executive Director of the Authors’ Licensing and Copyright Society. Continue reading Podcast LIVE | In conversation with Maggie Gee, author
Celebrating this year’s Chinese New Year of the Pig, I discuss translating China with Nicky Harman on the launch of Paper Republic’s roundup of the most recent publications in English translation. Their 2018 roll call features thirty-three novels, six poetry collections and three YA and children’s books.
Paper Republic is a unique resource you won’t find anywhere else on the web. Its co-founder, Nicky Harman, is a leading light of the translation community in the UK and a passionate promoter of Chinese literature and culture. She is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors). Nicky is often away, but I managed to catch up with her for brunch on Valentine’s day to discuss the literature of a non-English speaking continent that is 4,834 miles away from this small offshore island.
Continue reading Podcast LIVE | In Conversation with Nicky Harman | Translating China & Top 10 Reads
From the archive: Gael Elton Mayo writing about Spain in the 1950s
Madrid is a small town, yet it is not provincial; a clever achievement, “There goes so-and-so in his Jaguar, or X on his Vespa,” contributes to a really Main Street atmosphere – yet there are no provincial qualities of narrow mindedness or hypocrisy. On the contrary, we have rarely been anywhere more open in its general views about eccentricities of the human character. The small family is warm – the freedom is still great.
And at night this capital sounds like the country. From our apartment (which is in the middle, of the city) we hear donkeys braying, turkeys and cocks crowing . . . these last live in a 
barnyard next door to the British Embassy but are apparently not for English breakfast eggs, they just belong to a neighbour with space.
The edge of the town is a real edge. There are none of our dreary suburbs tailing off indefinitely and submerging your entrance or exit to the city in gloom. Abruptly the city stops. You feel the edge distinctly as you actually stand on it (on a parapet about the Palacio, or on the road to the university) and look out from its finality onto the land beyond. The city, the country. No half measure.
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m unusual in that I’m from a working class family – not many of us working in publishing, or getting published, for that matter. My parents weren’t great readers. My mum did notice and nurture my love of reading, however, by returning from jumble sales with bags of dog-eared books – Enid Blyton, Anne Fine, Roald Dahl. She was a wonderful mum.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
I think ‘work’ is the wrong word. None of us are earning any money from Dodo. I’m a writer (I somehow earn my living from writing) who moonlights as a publisher. I guess it’s an unusual reversal: writing is my day ‘job’, though I love it so much I don’t regard it as a job. We’re running Dodo out of passion for the books which publish. Continue reading Interview | Sam Mills, Dodo Ink | Indie Publisher of the Week
