It was a great pleasure to read from The Leipzig Affair at the beautiful Literaturhaus in Halle on 18 September as part of a conference on the ‘Second World’ in contemporary British writing at the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. A very engaged audience ensured that we had a lively discussion during the Q&A afterwards, which was … Read more
Very much looking forward to reading from The Leizpig Affair at the Literaturhaus in Halle on 18 September. I haven’t been to Halle since 1986 so I’m expecting to see some changes. The reading is part of a conference at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg on British literary engagement with the “second world”, which … Read more
Towards the end of May, I was able to make a day trip to the Shiant Isles from Scalpay with Eilean Glas Rib Tours. A planned four-day trip the previous week had been cancelled down to inclement weather and has now been rescheduled for July. It was a beautiful sunny day with calm seas as … Read more
Farewell London, hello Edinburgh has been a persistent refrain in the UK finance sector since the Brexit vote. Facing the loss of their European passport, London-based firms are looking to relocate. Luxembourg and Dublin are the obvious choices but Edinburgh is in the mix too. Lord Turner, former head of the Financial Services Authority, has … Read more
Sometimes fictional characters are not fictional at all. They are clearly based on someone real. Even properly fictional characters usually have some element of a real person in them. The genesis of the character Magda in my novel The Leipzig Affair was an idiosyncratic behavioural detail I observed in a friend of mine whom I … Read more
A newspaper article about portraits of abandoned buildings in Leipzig prompted me to unearth some photos I took on Leipzig’s Shakespearestraße when I was studying at the Karl Marx University Leipzig back in 1986. The apartment buildings on Shakespearestraße were not abandoned exactly, but I was impressed by their advanced state of dilapidation. There was … Read more
So selfie is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, having, in the view of the esteemed lexographers, evolved into a mainstream term for self-portrait. Indeed. Only the other week in Russian class our teacher showed us a photograph of some shipyard workers, looking into the camera, and asked us what they were doing. Working? Striking? … Read more
While out walking near Huisnis on the Isle of Harris on a particularly clear day last summer, my husband Pete and I caught sight of St Kilda – a mesmerising silvered smudge on the horizon. It’s easy to think you’ve seen St Kilda, only to discover later that you were contemplating some other outer isles … Read more