Nottingham Novelist
My friend John Lucas, who died last September, would have been 89 today. John was a poet, professor, publisher, essayist, memoirist, novelist, anthologist, critic and jazzman (not necessarily in that order). There are many tributes online and a Guardian obituary by our mutual friend, Michael Eaton. I was too shaken by John’s death to write about him when asked back then. John decided to stop…
This annual festival, organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust charity, is a labour of love by Greene enthusiasts, and this was my third visit. I wrote about last year’s here and this year I’ll also give a brief account of the festival. Note that, while I’m putting this on my blog this year (search Graham Greene in the bar on the left if you want to see my earlier posts about Greene), my…
I first read Graham Greene when I was nineteen. The University of Nottingham had a full run of his novels in the library. I spent much of my first term reading them when I should have been studying dull classics of early literature for my joint honours degree. His fiction fed my suspicion that what I wanted to do with my life was write novels. It wasn’t until 1990, the year of my first novel, and…
Back in the 80s, I read Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosley novels as they came out in the UK. They’re bleak but brilliant crime novels written in a stark style – the nearest European equivalent might be Jean-Patrick Manchette. Back in the 80s, they felt like they belonged with the American literary writers known as ‘dirty-realists’, my favourites of whom were Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and…
I go to gigs most weeks. Every year there tends to be a week where I have several. This week, it was five (nearly six, as I originally planned to see Nadia Reid at The Bodega on Monday). That’ll seem like overkill to some, but last year I was at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, where I would sometimes see five acts in a day, and I’m a regular at Green Man festival, where I’m likely to…