He lay looking straight up at the ceiling tiles. Then the shaking took him. It started in his hands on top of the blanket and went up his arms into his shoulders and his jaw, a fine hard shudder that rattled the side rail against its catch. He turned his head on the pillow and saw the IV pole standing beside the bed against the dim of the doorway, tall and thin, with the bag hung near the top of it and the light from the hall showing through,...

I was a big fan of Maggie O’Farrell’s autobiographical writing, I Am, I Am, I Am . Yet I couldn’t stomach more than a few pages of her multi-award winning bestseller—and soon to be adapted as a film— Hamnet. Land rekindled my love affair with O’Farrell’s writing. Epic is usually associated with books over 400 pages. Boring is another. But O’Farrell squeezing so much into such little space, the Irish Famine ( An Gorta Mór ) and its ripple effects...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent In the spring of 1819 all of London was reading a vampire, and the vampire belonged to Lord Byron. That was the line on the magazine. The New Monthly had run a story that April called "The Vampyre," a tale by Lord Byron , and it went through the drawing rooms like a low fever through a boarding house. Every mouth that praised it praised Byron. It was the sort of success a man can build a decade on...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09fs2x4/time-series-1-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0g5k1zt/time-series-2-episode-1 https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00316gl/time-series-3-episode-1 Jimmy McGovern is a writer. Helen Black and Samuel Bailey are writers too. But if Black and Bailey had approached the BBC with an idea about a drama series focusing on life inside a men’s, women’s and young offender’s institution with...

A Journey through Halloween Last weekend the M5 was closed in both directions at Gloucester. This was something of a dilemma as I had planned to see my lad for his birthday in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Everything turned out well as I took an alternative route across country from Junction 18 at the M4 through Cirencester and some wonderfully named locations including Moreton-in-Marsh. In one of the many fields along the way, I saw my first pumpkin...

Live readings can be a hit or miss affair. Apart from the nerves of reading out your work, the potential for stumbling, stalling - ‘dead air’ , or missing your place is enormous. Your aim is to promote, generate interest and hopefully avoid the crowd nodding off or scrolling. I was invited to do a reading at The Murder One Crime Writing Festival in the Lexicon Library in the beautiful seaside town of Dun Laoghaire in South County Dublin. So I...

The scream came from the left bank. It was a woman's scream. It went up high and long, ragged at the top, the sound of someone who has just seen something she can't stand to see, and it broke off. He held still. The tube turned slowly on the current until he was facing the bank. The phone light didn't reach it. There was only the black wall of the trees. The scream came again, closer to the water. "Hello?" he said. Then, louder, "Ma'am? You okay...

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent I went down to Bournemouth in the last week of 1885 to ask after something that had already been thrown away. I had it on fair authority that a writer living there had set a story down in the autumn, fast, and then got rid of it, and that the thing he got rid of was better than the thing he meant to print in its place. My editors were always sending me on that sort of errand, and I was always fool...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00327nr/the-substance I don’t know if there is a word ‘hokumy’ but somehow watchable? Algorithms are pushers. You’ll end up bleeding from the nose like a writer/director on a cocaine binge or Sue (Margaret Qualley) after watching The Substance . Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) plays an aging Hollywood actress and fitness guru that had me thinking that looks like Demi Moore, but I’d never seen her in those...

Heroes can be as boring as superheroes. There have been a slew of programmes with names like Who Dares Wins? Some recount the lost glory of figures that fought and never foundered during the early days of the second world war. Men a bit apart from the ordinary soldier. That’s Jason (Foxy) Fox. Joined the marines at the impossibly young age of sixteen and soldering was his life. The army was always there for him. And he was a natural leader with...