The Sweet Smell of Sliced Watermelon and Swimming with Dolphins
While snow has bucketed down across the Northern hemisphere, I’ve been fighting a duel today with my modem (Broadband doesn’t come easily in Africa!) and have only just managed to pick up all the ABBA news like Leslie’s lovely icy descriptions and Meg’s blog on the Big Outdoors and Elen’s notebook and the 100 odd emails on the books everyone got for Christmas. Sitting here barelegged and barefooted tapping away at these keys I feel about as out of touch and as isolated as being stranded in a snow-bound home. So with the sweet smell of sliced watermelon wafting up...
And the Winner Is…?
Last week I was at an IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) event that celebrated the nomination of author, David Almond, and author/illustrator, Michael Foreman, for next year’s top prize in international children’s literature – the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Winners will be announced at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in March 2010 and the Awards will be presented at the IBBY World Congress in Santiago de Compostela.It’s given biennially by IBBY to a living author and illustrator whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature. David Almond and Michael Foreman, nominated by the...
A Google-eyed slant on the world
As a break from editing the bare breasts and sex out of my Egyptian novel Eye of the Moon for a US publisher, I’m reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? simultaneously. The three make very odd companions while I shift from 1500 BC to the 16th century, and then on to the digital world of now. In What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis suggests we have to kill books to save them. He says they’re dead because they’re frozen in time with no means to update except by new editions, they’re a one-way relationship...
All this in Autumn in Urbisaglia, le Marche
Hilltop villages, winding roads, a shepherd sitting on a red blanket while his pecorino sheep browse, sunflower fields flattened to grids of black stalks and deeply ploughed raw umber earth bordered by silvery olive groves… this is Le Marche in autumn. Not picture postcard but with an earthy ruggedness. I’ve just spent a week across the valley from Urbisaglia, a town at the crossroads between coast and interior where the Roman town of Urbs Salvia once existed. Its amphitheatre, still fairly intact, and the stones of its aquaduct, cisterns, baths, theatre and tombs all that remain of the colony that...