Reviews & features: Books, Suzanne Black

James Lasdun - The Art of the Short Story

Over the years James Lasdun has turned his pen to novels, screenplays, travel writing, journalism and poetry, but short stories are his current medium of choice, having recently published his third collection, It’s Beginning to Hurt. Lasdun suggests…

Kei Miller

Jamaican voice aching to be heard

In a famous sketch by Bill Hicks, the great comedian is stumped by the question, ‘What are you reading for?’ The enquiry – and its correlative, ‘What are you writing for?’ – are deceptively simple. For Kei Miller, the Jamaican-born poet, novelist and…

Desert storm

‘The disease in question had, as its main deleterious effect, the fact that it renders its victims perfectly unable to write anything but 500-page books about the civil war in Sudan.’ The ‘victim’ in this case is US author Dave Eggers, but the…

Debut writers

Edinburgh International Book Festival

This year’s batch of debut authors is rich and varied. Suzanne Black finds that while some of them may be escaping from a successful parent’s shadow or scripting identity dramas, they ultimately have one thing in common

Lucy Hawking

What do you do when your father is one of the world’s most respected theoretical physicists, author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time and you want to be a writer? The answer was obvious to Lucy Hawking, daughter of Stephen: write a book…