Blogs

To call Les Murray the Aussie Seumas Heaney is selling them both short though both are the Big Countrymen of their land. Les does land, place, people seeing and feeling the land, people working the smalltown sawmills of his beginnings, creatures, Nature all done par excellence. Also a sense of the era, a working class son of the 50's going to uni, travelling previously unheard of distances to barroom debates of books and politics, a real feel of...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is perhaps best known for his creation of the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. Keen Sherlock Holmes aficionados suggest a link between Holmes and nineteen-century Edinburgh medical school lecturer, Joseph Bell, grandson of forensic surgeon and pathologist, Benjamin. Keen observation and deductive reasoning were the hallmarks of Bell and Holmes’s observations. Joseph Bell, for example, would demonstrate this ability to...

Pete and I have been reading and rereading like mad for the past few weeks - all the stunning poetry and prose that makes ABC such a wonderful community to be a part of, and I think it would be fair to say that nailing the very best is the hardest thing we’ve collectively done. Here are our Picks of the Year for 2014 - we hope you like them as much as we did! For the Story of the Year it’s a tie: both very different but equally wonderful...

Well if this first week of the New Year is a portent then we are in for a fantastic twelve months of creative writing! Deciding what should be promoted to picks of the week is never easy and this week was no different. But decisions have been made and this week's story is a wonderful piece of flash fiction that its author does so well: http://www.abctales.com/story/markbrown/reparations and the poem of the week is: http://www.abctales.com/story/...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04xw2x8/the-superrich-and-us-episode-1 It’s no longer enough to say people are rich. We don’t for example say: the super poor and us. There’s nothing super about being poor and it’s less easy to play with such words and quantify meaning by adding another layer of description. Let’s just say that if a hypothetical me existed on less than £8K a year and Peretti is on about say ten times as much, for example, £...

I never knew my mother's birthplace was so strange! Written by a journalist from neighbouring Poland, these are snappy, true and anecdotally sort-of-true tales from the Czech half of the Czech Republic. The introductory timeline is essential. Czechoslovakia went from being a mittel-europa kingdom to a Hitlerite state in 1939 then a Stalinist state from the 50's until the Velvet Revolution in 1968.(this is not to be confused with the Velvet...

I thought the idea of half a yellow sun, a poetic idea, a trope with no real meaning. I knew nothing of Nigeria. Ignorance is not an excuse, but it is an alibi. However unfeasible I associated Biafra with tearstained and potbellied children starving to death. I wasn’t far wrong. Half a Yellow Son was the emblem worn on the sleeves of Biafran soldiers during the Nigeria-Biafar war, when the latter fought for independence, to become a separate...

Here are a few markers of decrepitude. Going baldy. There’s literally a big stamp on your forehead that screams baldy old fart. Your gums are white and receding and what teeth you have are yellow. The left hand that doesn't grip as well as it should and the right hand isn't what it was. Try opening a jar. Your balance is that of a two-year old child. You trip over things. Literally a five-year old could push you over. When you trip, you fall...

Asweh! This book is hutious. Stephen's lively crossover tale takes us inside the world of Harrison Opuka. Recently from Ghana, now in towerblock land East London, 11 year old Harri is a fast runner and a fast learner. Apart from the odd event, such as the murder of a young neighbour, watching the theft of a tray of chickens from the market and the public deportation of a trader, Church, the local carnival and trading banter insults with big sis...

Congratulations this week, (for the second time in a row!) to Old Jack is Back for his excellent Janus in a Dinner Jacket, and also to Sean McNulty for Christmas Game Over using a format borrowed from the Fighting Fantasy books. It's set at a Christmas party and works surprisingly well! http://www.abctales.com/story/old-jack-back/janus-dinner-jacket http://www.abctales.com/story/sean-mcnulty/christmas-game-over Here's this week's Inspiration...