An Interview with Joanne Limburg
By Victoria What I absolutely loved about A Want of Kindness was the voice you’ve managed to create. It was so brilliantly of the 17th century without ever losing clarity or…
Spotlight on Young Adult Fiction – Autumn 2015
By Memory Scarlett and Jenny Young adult fiction seems unstoppable these days, with its ever-increasing bookshop floor space and arbitrary, balkanized genre divisions. It’s clear that good YA fiction is…
Interview with Sam Mills, Editorial Director of Dodo Ink
Interview by Victoria The founders of Dodo Ink are a blogger/reviewer, a novelist and a digital publishing specialist – such an intriguing combination. How did you all come together and decide…
The Shiny Poetry Competition
It’s not just Man Booker prize season, the publication date of Issue 7 of Shiny New Books coincides (deliberately) with National Poetry Day 2015, on and it’s the 21st Birthday of…
Q&A with Kathleen Benner Duble about Madame Tussaud’s Apprentice
Questions by Jenny Your fascination with Madame Tussaud is obvious. What led to your decision not to set the book from her perspective, but rather from the perspective of an invented street…
Suspense with Style: The Novels of Mary Stewart
Written by Lory Widmer Hess “The whole affair began so very quietly.” With the first line of her first novel, Mary Stewart already proclaimed herself a sublimely intelligent storyteller, saying…
Interview with David Bradley, winner of the NHE Essay Prize 2015
Ingrid Wassenaar met up with David Bradley, winner of the second Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize for his essay ‘A Eulogy for Nigger’ for a conversation. Tell me your story! Well, what…
An extract from the NHE Essay Prize winner
From ‘A Eulogy for Nigger’ by David Bradley DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered . . . as the National Association for the Advancement of … People put to rest a…
On Writing Places I’ve Never Been To by Hugo Wilcken
As a teenager, I’d spend hours on my own wandering the stacks of Sydney’s State Library. Its vast, airy reading room mimics those of libraries I later used in London…
The Eds Discuss: The Books & Author Package
Although there always have been superstar authors, for everyone else, gone are the days when you could write a book and leave it to your publisher to sell it for…
Great Sexpectations by Non Pratt
Non is the author of two YA novels, the latest of which, Remix, is reviewed in our fiction section here. She recently took part in a panel discussion at the Young Adult Literature…
The Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize
Raymond Tallis Talks to Ingrid Wassenaar Those lovely people at Notting Hill Editions, home of the best in non-fiction essay writing, are in the midst of their search for the winner…
Things in my book I don’t want others to know, by Katarina Bivald
“Don’t write about what you know, write about what you don’t want others to know.” I don’t know who originally said it, but it is one of the best bits…
The IFFP Ceremony: A Report from the Shadow Jury
Text by David Hebblethwaite The Florence Hall at the London headquarters of RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) is a suitably grand space for awarding a literary prize, and…
Glimpses of Long-Past Summers: Four Vintage Canadian Authors to Explore
By Barb Scharf High summer in Canada brings long days of blue skies and sunshine, with blazing hot afternoons and late warm evenings and all around the vibrant growth of…
The Shiny Book Club – The Paying Guests – Now let’s discuss…
Introduced by Simon Get ready for the second round of The Shiny Book Club! For this issue (though the discussion will take place in our Extra Shiny issue in about…
In Development – Books into Films: A Summer 2015 Reading List
By Diana Cheng In recent months, several actresses at different occasions had spoken out about the lack of female lead characters in movies. Seeing the dearth of significant female roles, actress Reese…
Q&A with Nicola Upson
Interview by Harriet It’s seven years since your first ‘Josephine Tey’ novel, An Expert in Murder, was published by Faber, and this year sees London Rain, the sixth in this highly successful series…
Writing about secrets, the false self and insecure identities in my novel, Sugar and Snails, by Anne Goodwin
Article by Anne Goodwin We all have secrets, things we’ve done or aspects of ourselves that we can reveal only to our nearest and dearest, and sometimes not even to…
Martin Edwards Q&A
Questions by Harriet Harriet: Martin, although you have been a solicitor all your working life, it’s probably true to say that until recently you have been best known for your crime…
Interview with Jon Day, Author of Cyclogeography
Interview with Ingrid Wassenaar (Wednesday 3 June 2015) The other day, my son donned a backpack and wobbled off down our garden path on his small two-wheeler, all by himself,…
Writing about Secrets, the False Self and Insecure Identities in my Novel, Sugar and Snails by Anne Goodwin
We all have secrets, things we’ve done or aspects of ourselves that we can reveal only to our nearest and dearest, and sometimes not even to them. We all have…
The Inspiration Behind ‘Hush’
Written by Sara Marshall-Ball Photography has always been a strong presence in my life. I put this mainly down to my mother, who has meticulously catalogued my entire existence from…
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015)
By Harriet Devine Ruth Rendell’s death on 2 May this year has brought to an end a career spanning an astonishing fifty years. By the time you are reading this,…