After reading War and Peace I felt that someone should gallop up and hang a medal around my neck. I’m easily confused and Russian names are Russian to me. Childhood is a much easier beast. Short pen-portraits of, for example, ‘The Tutor, Karl Ivanitch,’ ‘Mama,’ ‘Papa,’ ‘Lessons,’ ‘The Idiot’. His is a very structured life. Papa is a little god, all bow before him. He runs the estate with an iron grip. No rouble unaccounted for. Yet, he can lose...

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

For the past year or so, I have, from time to time, been posting stories on ABCtales about the two dogs at TURN Education, Packham and India and seeing the world from their perspective. My thanks to everyone here who kindly read the stories and commented. I've now gathered alll of these stories together, plus a few new ones especially written, in a paperback book for children released in time for Christmas. I think the best thing I can do is...

Who will speak for us? —is sometimes as simple as who speaks like us. We all might be Jock Tamson’s bairns, but in the real world debut novelists those using Scottish dialect don’t win prizes. How Late it Was, How Late , well it was 1985 when something like this happened. James Kelman caused a kerfuffle. Rabbi Julia Neuberger saying the book was ‘crap’. I prefer Jeff Torrington, Swing Hammer Swing , or Janice Galloway’s memoir that’s not a...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08vy19b/small-axe-series-1-mangrove In my day Steve McQueen was the go-to guy if you wanted ride a motorcycle over barbed wire to escape the Germans, or rescue screaming women and children from a building skyscraper. We’re still waiting for the enquiry into Grenfell Tower, but we all know the score. Nothing much will be done, while the issues of class and race hatred will be quietly shunted into a side-line...