Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in the outskirts of Paris, and I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and in Paris, France.
What sorts of books were in your family home?
My father who is French read scientific books, but he loved Jules Verne, and my mother who is British initiated me to Daphné du Maurier.
Who were early formative influences as a writer?
Anne Frank, Edgar Poe, Enid Blyton, C.S Lewis. Continue reading Interview | Tatiana de Rosnay | Author of the Week
Author, BEN PASTOR, lived for thirty years in the United States, working as a university professor, before returning to Italy to write historical thrillers. Bitter Lemon Press have published six of her novels to date.
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Rome, and grew up in the hill country southeast of the city. Ten elements typified our small town: Roman ruins; rainy springs; olive groves; sparkling red wine; farm women dressing in beautiful traditional garb on holidays; the Thursday fair; more steps than streets (a problem and a good exercise for my family doctor father); a tall church steeple from where you could glimpse the sea in the far distance; cats, dogs, and farm animals of all kinds; the feeling that the world was orderly, cyclical, and safe.
What sorts of books were in your family home?
All sorts (except pornography) and too many to count. As children, my sister Simona and I used to read avidly, and then have a picnic on top of the tall bookshelves of the family library. Years later, we found mummified little pieces of sandwiches behind the furniture when we moved out. Mother had a passion for nineteenth-and-twentieth-century literature: the great French, English, Spanish, Russian, Italian, American authors . . . Father loved geography, history and mysteries; all of us had a fondness for poetry and art. From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Nicholas Nickleby, from Blood and Sand to Dead Souls, the steps to culture and to our picnic place were all there! Continue reading Interview | Ben Pastor, novelist | Author of the Week
Andrew Crumey: “Art is the expression of value and science is the explanation of phenomena . . . I’m interested in the borderline of the explanatory and the expressive.”
Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, A.L. Kennedy, Allan Massie, Val McDermid, Andrew O’Hagan, Ian Rankin, Ali Smith, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner . . . the list of fine Scottish writers is a long one.
Andrew Crumey was in conversation with doyenne of translators, Margaret Jull Costa, and Eric Lane, founder of Dedalus Books at the opening event of the BookBlast 10×10 Tour at Waterstones in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, on 11 September. HEAR HERE
Continue reading Podcast | LIVE interview: Andrew Crumey, author
Meet Paul Ewen in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Castle Street, Norwich 6.30 p.m. Thursday 11 OCT. His latest novel Forbidden Line, Francis Plug: Writer in Residence is published today, 4 October. Theme: All Hail the New Modernists! Experimentalism & Contemporary Literature. With Sam Jordison from Galley Beggar Press, chair, and authors Alex Pheby, Paul Stanbridge. Book Tickets
Forbidden Line, Francis Plug: Writer in Residence is published today, 4 October.
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in Blenheim, New Zealand. I grew up in various places around the South Island, like Christchurch and Lyttelton, but I spent my formative years in a town called Ashburton (nicknamed Ashvegas).
What sorts of books were in your family home?
All sorts. Art books, NZ fiction, and lots of library books because my Mum was a librarian. Continue reading Interview | Paul Ewen, author
Meet C. D. Rose in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Leeds 6.30 p.m. Thursday 20 SEPT. Theme: Birmingham & Leeds: A Tale of Two Cities. With Ra Page COMMA PRESS chair, authors C.D. Rose (The Book of Birmingham) and Ian Duhig (The Book of Leeds). Book Tickets
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born in a small semi-detached house in south Manchester, and there I grew up. While I still love Manchester, I have an inexplicable fear of semi-detached houses. Continue reading Interview | C. D. Rose, author
Meet Ian Duhig in person at the 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Leeds 6.30 p.m. Thurs 20 SEPT. Theme: Birmingham & Leeds: A Tale of Two Cities. With Ra Page COMMA PRESS chair, authors C.D. Rose (The Book of Birmingham) and Ian Duhig (The Book of Leeds). Book Tickets
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
London, the eighth of my parents but the first not born in Ireland, so I grew up in the London-Irish community of Paddington.
What sorts of books were in your family home?
Not many books but my mother knew a lot of poetry by heart as that’s how they learned it in Ireland in her youth; this with all her songs were very important to me.
Who were early formative influences as a writer?
I liked poetry at school but when I worked in Belfast in a hostel for young offenders before the Good Friday Agreement, discovering the Northern Irish poets like Heaney, Longley, Mahon, Muldoon, McGuckiand and more recently Sinead Morrissey was electrifying. Continue reading Interview | Ian Duhig, author & poet
Meet Dan Micklethwaite in person at the BookBlast® 10×10 Tour discussion at Waterstones, Newcastle, 6.30 p.m. Wednesday 12 SEPT. Theme: The Northern Influence on Culture. With Kevin Duffy BLUEMOOSE BOOKS chair, authors Dan Micklethwaite (The Less than Perfect Legend of Donna Creosote) and Colette Snowden (The Secret to not Drowning). Book Tickets
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born and brought up in Brighouse, West Yorkshire. Continue reading Interview | Dan Micklethwaite, author
The BookBlast® celebration of independent publishing was kicked off in 2016 via online journal The BookBlast® Diary, idea being to showcase daring, risk-taking small publishers who fill a unique niche discovering talent, publishing authentic and offbeat books which add value to the cultural landscape.
We are now going offline and into the 9 regions of England this Autumn with THE BOOKBLAST® 10×10 TOUR 2018 in association with Waterstones.
Why not show your support for small independent publishers, writers and translators? Please spread the word and support our KICKSTARTER campaign: you can pledge, enjoy and spread the word HERE…
Come to the first tour event on 11 September at 6.30pm in Waterstones, Gower Street, or to one of the 9 regional talks! We have lots of goodies and tickets to #giveaway so visit us and let everyone know how much you love to support #crowdfunding great new writing and ideas.
The BookBlast® 10×10 Tour is about extraordinary writing inspiring readers to explore what’s happening in the world now. Audiences will encounter writers from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, up-and-coming British talent.
Waterstones may be a nationwide chain, but is clearly awake to the potential of small independent publishers and showcasing them to a high-street audience.
The tour connects London and the regions and showcases some of the finest independent-spirited literature and poetry being published today.
I look forward to seeing you all on the campaign trail and at a 10×10 Tour event in the Autumn. Ciao for now! G@BB
The BookBlast® 10×10 Tour catalogue is available for download or viewing online HERE
The publication of Amnesia Nights in the UK is a first for Quinton Skinner, the critically-acclaimed author of three novels and non-fiction books on fatherhood and rock ‘n’ roll. A former critic and magazine editor, he has written for publications including Minneapolis Star Tribune, Huffington Post, Variety, Glamour and Literary Hub. He lives in Minneapolis, USA.
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
I was born and grew up in a working-class area of Columbus, a university city and the capital of Ohio in the U.S.
What sorts of books were in your family home?
There were quite a few. I remember The Ascent of Man, based on the BBC Series of the same name, because it captured my imagination conceptually. My father had a lovely bound series of all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I was preoccupied with an astronomy book in the home and spent a good deal of time as well with the encyclopedia and the world atlas. I also read mountains of age-appropriate stuff from the library down the street. I was the child always with his head down in some kind of printed matter.
Who were early formative influences as a writer?
Virginia Woolf for her vivid interiority. Saul Bellow for compassion and ambition. Denis Johnson for the dark alleys and the byways. Martin Amis for materialism and humor. Of course the first was Dr. Seuss, who obsessed me with his knack for the sideways hidden dimensions both in language and the visual world, a sense of the uncanny that I recognized as familiar to me, and essential to the way I saw (and heard, and spoke) things. There was also a series of crime-solving books revolving around a character called Encyclopedia Brown, which may not be read anymore but which were essential crime procedurals for the under-10 set. Continue reading Interview | Quinton Skinner, author
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
In suburban North London near the end of the Northern Line, in a small maternity home at the top of Hampstead Heath which later became a NHS nurses’ residence.
What sorts of books were in your family home? What did you read as a child?
Plenty, and an eclectic mix, but not entire walls or rooms of them. Always a fresh haul from the local library. My mother’s shelves had one of the very first Penguins: André Maurois’ Ariel (about Shelley). My father’s included rows of Pevsner’s Buildings of England, which always accompanied us on country walks and holidays. He knew German, went to German conversation classes until the end of life, so there was also some German literature in the original.
I vacuumed up the contents of the library (my first was Friern Barnet, not long ago saved from closure by a community campaign). I was a scattergun bookworm although I did early on develop a taste for classic science fiction (Verne to Bradbury). Also piles of books about cricket (again, always from the library). Somehow I fell in love with a collection picked up for a few pence from a jumble sale: Best Modern American Humour, in effect an anthology of the great New Yorker wits: Parker, Thurber, Benchley etc. I loved them then. Still love them now. Continue reading Interview | Boyd Tonkin | Author of the Week
