2018: The Year of Relearning How to Focus
Driven by a giddy need to make up for lost time, my first full year post-cancer treatment was full tilt with travel, art galleries, books, family and friends. I also finally learned how to use my iPhone camera – you touch the screen to focus, doh! Fizzing with this epiphany, I even signed up for a iPhone photography course, way…
Seoul Survivors Blasts Off (Again!)
A hole in the Gatwick main runway, transport chaos across Europe due to unseasonal storms, a cross-continental epidemic of terrorist attacks, including the assassination of Jo Cox, the flames of Syria still raging unabated while the UK news is all of Brexit, British political convulsions, and the Clinton-Trump mud-flinging match: it’s been a pretty tempestuous summer so far, and…
Blind Creations: Lighting the Grow/volution!
As the Greeks vote a resounding NO to austerity, here in the UK disabled activists prepare again to storm Westminster on Wednesday to protest the abolishment of the Independent Living Fund. Everywhere the war on the poor is cutting deep, and people are fighting back. We living in desperate times, and yet also there’s an exciting spirit of defiance…
Post-Prague Reveries
Ahoj! Here I am back from Prague, where esoteric author Cyril Simsa arranged for me to bring The Gaia Chronicles to the Renaissance bower of the Anglo-American University, and troubadours John McKeown and Lucien Zell invited me to read poetry at Pracovna, an ultra-chic café and ‘co-working space’ built from repurposed factory palettes and hub caps. There’s no pic of…
My Prague Spring
I head to Prague tomorrow, on a trip I’m starting to think of as a pilgrimage – a chance to pay homage to the silvery Czech spores that seeded my science fiction fate . . . I’m recalling here my best friend in Canada in grade eight, a Czechoslovakian girl called Nora, with whom I collaborated on a ‘space opera’…
Rook Song Flies the Nest!
Rook Song: Book Two of The Gaia Chronicles my Science Fantasy epic from Jo Fletcher Books launches in Brighton Feb 6th – please come & help it fly the nest in style! Continuing Astra’s adventures, Rook Song opens her world up to many people’s stories – it’s eco-dystopia meets radical resistance, a polyphonic hymn to human diversity. To celebrate accordingly,…
2015: The year of living philosophically?
Farewell 2014, but may your turning tides sweep us between the icebergs and whirlpools of political despair and environmental collapse, toward the hard-won shores of a fairer world. For though global disasters and injustices only seemed to intensify this year – climate change, Syria bleeding into Iraq, Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, Ebola, Boko Haram, racist executions on the streets…
Astra & Eco-Literature: Havant Lit Fest Event [Sunday Oct 12th]
From Palestine to eco-literature – my autumn events are rippling out into planetary concerns. Many thanks to the Havant Literary Festival (Oct 3-12) for inviting me to read from Astra at the eco-literature event on their programme this year. I was leaf-tickled to hear that my friend the wonderful eco-poet Helen Moore has been added to the bill! A half-day…
Tottenham Palestine Literature Festival 2014
Getting excited! Sept 19-20 I’ll be taking part in the second Tottenham Palestine Literature Festival, organised by Haringey Justice for Palestine. The festival is a free weekend of literature, politics, music and Palestinian food, held at the West Green Learning Centre and featuring an international cast including Ghada Karmi, Selma Dabbagh, Baroness Jenny Tonge, Brian Whitaker and Sarah Schulman. Guests…