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September 15, 2025
August 17, 2025Or, what’s an mp3, why I love them, and why you should too Cut to the chase: an mp3 is an audio file which you can play on any browser. Your laptop, your smartphone, iPad, whatever. You don’t need to download any special app in order to open it, because your device will default to whatever appropriate app it already…
June 17, 2025The news broke today that Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King has at long last gained Grade 1 listed status. Of course this gladdened my heart because, as a teenager and a student, growing up in very noisy household, it was one of my favourite haunts - a place to go for a bit of peace. If you think…
January 9, 2025Author of the Month, December 2024 - Radio Interview It felt like a celebration to end 2014 as Author of the Month for the broadcast "Community Connections" on my most local radio station, Sherborne's Abbey 104. Every author wants to find the right readers, people with whom our work resonates in one way or another. And I was doubly lucky…
September 21, 2024Where better to launch the paperback of Amateurs than the café bar of a first-class music venue?After all, the book's as much about socialising as it is about singing. We wanted a party and definitely got one - I'm only sad I can't post photos of the fun bits, all because I forgot to seek permission from attendees to share…
March 21, 2024Here’s a new thing. I was recently contacted by Ben Fox at Shepherd.com and invited to write a set of 5 short book reviews on a theme of my choosing. In exchange, the site would feature one of my books. I hadn’t heard of this site - it’s relatively new - but the name says it all. The idea is…
March 7, 2023It was meeting with readers of Joe Faber and the Optimists that first got me thinking seriously about producing an audio book. Many stroke survivors find physical books difficult to handle; my husband's one of them, and only reads on a tablet now. For others, though, brain injury has affected the ability to read at all, and audio is their…
May 20, 2022https://youtu.be/d-fQFMO7654Back in March, as the war in Ukraine gathered pace, I became obsessed with the memory of a poem I'd studied as a sixth-former, by the Soviet poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Ostensibly about child-rearing, the poem describes the way the communist state seeks to infantilise the masses. "You shouldn't tell untruths to little children."But when I tried to track the poem…
July 3, 2021Music to my ears from David Mitchell at this year's Sidmouth Literary Festival Knowing neurosis from the inside ought to be really useful for a novelist, if only it didn’t make it so very hard to get yourself into the starting gate. If you don’t dare call yourself a writer, you can’t say you suffer from ‘writers’ block,’ can you? …
April 15, 2021Thank you Kelly at www.lovebookstours.com for organising this virtual book tour! And to all the lovely book bloggers who participated.
