Blogs

It's so great, as we celebrate our twentieth birthday, to see that the quality of work on ABC is as brilliant and varied as ever. Story of the Week goes to Peter Bennett's 'A Hauf an a Hauf'. It takes skill and courage to use dialect as your narrative voice, and Peter manages it brilliantly with characters that leap off the page with warmth, humour and pathos: A Hauf an a Hauf | ABCtales No doubt at all in my mind about the Poem of the Week -...

Thank you so much to all the ABC Talers (and friends!) who participated in our Zoom Reading Event last Saturday. It was an absolutely brilliant evening. Special thanks to Mark Burrow for all the organisation and the compering. It will be on our YouTube channel in the New Year, so keep an eye out for it there! Also lots and lots of thanks to those who have sent donations to ABC. If your donation had a name on it you should have had a reply by now...

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a book worth reading more than once—I won’t, of course, too many other books to discover and read, but sometimes we need to pause. The mark of a wonderful book is you can open it any page and learn something. Here’s the start, which is so important (as us writers know), for setting the tone. ‘Let me begin again. Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you—even if each word put down is one word further away from where...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000pz1w/storyville-locked-in-breaking-the-silence I once told the doctor there was nothing much wrong with me, apart from bits falling off. I’m hitting sixty and that’s the kind of thing you expect. My biggest fear is dementia. When you talk to others, often you hear, ‘My mum, or my da… had it’. Director and cameraman Xavier Alford, aged 42, is a father of two and he suffers from a rare neurological disease...

I’d already read Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha . Perhaps I didn’t appreciate in the way I should the first time. A few things I remembered: it was set in Japan, and it was seemingly a memoir about a Geisha. The sort of information that even the outgoing President of the United States would be able to pick up from flashcards, or the cover of the novel when prompted. Perhaps he would recognise that Japan wasn’t on his list of ‘shitty...

Gold Medal Winner of the 2020 Cerasus Poetry Olympics