Subscribe now

The sound drifting towards me on the soft summer air is mechanical, a whirring and clicking, as if an automaton lurks in the woods below. I wait until I see it: and for a brief moment he’s there, cruciform against the smudged indigo of the darkening sky. A male nightjar churring at dusk, warning intruders that this is his and his mate’s territory. Nightjars, or fern owls as they were once known, are superbly camouflaged visitors from Africa, who hide by day and emerge at dusk and dawn. And this pair are nesting in a truly enchanted spot: Ashdown Forest, the landscape that inspired one of the world’s most loved children’s stories: Winnie-the-Pooh.

This year, 2026, marks 100 years since the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published. After his death, the author, AA Milne, left a portion of his Winnie-the-Pooh royalties to the Royal Literary Fund as a legacy to support writers. I’m here as a writer who has been supported by the RLF to visit the places described in Milne’s books and poems, which have inspired generations of readers. And as a trained zoologist and rewilder, I’d like to see how these famous fictional spots, from The Hundred Acre Wood to the Heffalump Trap, have become a haven for wildlife.

Share

Where I’m standing right now, watching the nightjar pair, is a steep-sided sandy heath. The first heather buds are beginning to show, pale and pink and pointed as ballet shoes; the scent of gorse is toasted coconut. All around me are heath-spotted orchids; tutus of taffeta-pink and burnt-magenta. Ashdown Forest is one of the largest open access-areas in south-east England. Two-thirds of its 6,500 acres is heathland, habitat rarer than a tropical rainforest and home to some of Europe’s most threatened species. And even though over 1.5 million visitors come here — it’s only 30 miles from London — it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Here you’ll find exquisite fauna and flora, from Dartford warblers to silver-studded blue butterflies to lesser butterfly-orchids.

Milne moved here, buying Cotchford Farm on the edge of the Forest, in East Sussex, in 1925. “Cotchford took possession of us,” wrote his son, Christopher Milne in his memoir, The Enchanted Places. The surrounding jungle, fields, woods and streams became “the site of so many small adventures and happy memories”. It was here that Christopher, who was five when they moved, had adventures with his toys: his bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore. Perhaps because Milne was not good with children, according to Christopher, but was desperate to connect with his son, he started to tell him stories. As Christopher wrote:

Share

Ash Walmsley, Head of Countryside for Ashdown Forest, gives me an insider’s guided tour. We visit Galleon’s Lap, Gill’s Lap Clump and Roo’s Sandy Pit, a disused quarry where baby Roo played before the other toys kidnapped him. I see Dartford warblers, singing on briars, male stonechats with their bracken-rusted breasts; skylarks soar overhead just as they did when Henry VIII hunted here and battles were waged over commoners’ rights to graze.

Ash takes me to see the herds of wild Exmoor ponies and gentle, cream-coloured ‘riggit’ Galloway cattle, which are stopping the furze and the scrub from taking over and are maintaining the Forest as a mosaic of open moorland with pockets of deciduous woodland.

Share

We can’t leave, of course, without visiting Poohsticks Bridge, in Posingford Wood. Christopher used to come here to throw sticks over one side and watch them from the other as they floated awaydownstream. The moss-coated bridge spanning tea-brown water looks much as it did when EH Shepard first illustrated the Winnie-the-Pooh tales, although, thanks to the huge numbers of visitors trampling over it, it has had to be rebuilt twice.

“It is difficult to be sure which came first,” wrote Christopher. “Did I do something? And did my father then write a story around it? Or was it the other way about, and did the story come first? Certainly my father was on the lookout for ideas; but so too was I. He wanted ideas for his stories, I wanted them for my games, and each looked towards the other for inspiration.” He couldn’t recall whether, as a child he visited the bridge before or after his father’s story of it, but concluded, “In the end it was all the same: the stories became a part of our lives; we lived them, thought them, spoke to them.”

Share

Today the Forest is owned by the Ashdown Forest Trust and managed by the Conservators of Ashdown Forest. That Ashdown Forest exists at all is in part thanks to Christopher, who, alongside the Ashdown Forest Trust, helped campaign against the land being sold for development in the 1980s. Hopefully, in another 100 years’ time, we will still be celebrating this glorious sweep of heathland, and the magical stories a father created about and for his son.

Share

Dr Sanjida O’Connell is an RLF Fellow and writes Wild Writing with Sanjida. She has had four non-fiction books, eight novels and several short stories published. She writes psychological thrillers as Sanjida Kay. Bone by Bone, The Stolen Child, My Mother’s Secret and One Year Later were published by Corvus Books; The Divide was published in The Book of Bristol by Comma Press; The Beautiful Game in The Perfect Crime, was published by Harper Collins; Grace’s Cave was released on BBC Radio 4 and Meat will be out shortly in Monster Capital (Comma Press).

Sanjida has been shortlisted for the BBC Asia Awards, the Betty Trask Award for Romantic Fiction, the Daily Telegraph Science Writer’s Award, Asian Woman of the Year, highly commended for BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Award for Nature Writing, long listed for a Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger, shortlisted for a CWA Short Story Dagger and has won a CWA Short Story Dagger.

Sanjida is currently serialising a nature memoir on Substack, Wilderness: In Search of Belonging, about growing up dual heritage in rural Britain, and rewilding a patch of land in Somerset.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

I don’t think there can be one definitive book or work that every writer should read – we are each inspired and informed by different things at different times. I would, however, recommend reading anything that you’re not supposed to. When I was about eight, I remember going to a children’s book fair and being told by an adult that I shouldn’t have a book I’d chosen because it was ‘only suitable for age thirteen’. Reader, I bought the book. Similarly, at one school, we were discouraged from studying poetry because it was not an exam syllabus option that the teacher supported for the whole class. These are not good reasons to limit your imagination. In these times of increasing political censorship, it’s particularly important that if someone tells you not to read something, you read it to find out why.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

A lot of procrastination, AKA research! I don’t really have a typical writing day at the moment, but if I’m writing commissioned drama, that has to be more disciplined. I would spend the first few days constructing the scene-by-scene breakdown; then I’d set myself a minimum number of scenes per day, to deliver the draft by the deadline, e.g., six–three in the morning, three in the afternoon or more if I’m up against it. They could be any six, not necessarily chronological, and I’d try to choose a mixture of different types of scene (big set pieces, like rows in the pub, interspersed with intimate two-handers, small groups, comedy/action/emotional drama), so that I wouldn’t be left with all the difficult stuff I’d been avoiding at the end. Subsequent drafts are more unpredictable, depending on what kind of notes you get back and how much restructuring is required. A seemingly small note can have a big knock-on.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

Influence can be both positive and negative. Just putting that out there, as I’m sure many of us will have had our confidence dented by a negatively influential person! On the positive side, my BBC radio producer, Abigail le Fleming. We’d first worked together in TV, on Casualty, and years later she championed my debut radio play, The Things We Never Said, which I’d written on spec for stage, inspired by the emotional and psychological impact of my mum’s dementia. As an impressionistic, non-linear piece, it was not an easy pitch and was initially turned down, but Abigail stuck with it, finally got it commissioned, and directed it with great intelligence and sensitivity.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

That having the ability to write is only a tiny fraction of the job of being a writer. If you want to get paid for your work and maintain some semblance of a career, particularly in dramatic media, it’s about 90% hustle (pitching, networking, fostering collaborative relationships, reading industry politics, and now marketing and PR as well). If that doesn’t come naturally (and it doesn’t for me), you have to learn.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

Probably a version of ‘less is more’. In general, I find it hard to be pithy. I tend to write long first drafts and spend the rest of the time editing down to get to the essence. Even when you think you’ve cut it to the bone, there’s usually still something that can go. A good editor’s eye is useful for illuminating what’s unnecessary, but when it comes down to word count, I’d rather do the final cut myself, to preserve the rhythm, which sometimes gets forgotten.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

It would be tempting to say winning the Writers’ Guild Best Radio Drama Award for The Things We Never Said, but although that was a lovely moment of professional validation, I think I was most moved by, and proud of, the reaction of the audience when it first went out, with no fanfare on a weekday afternoon. Almost instantly, people I’d never met were tweeting about it, seeing their own experience reflected in something I’d thought was very personal to me. It was my first original work to be broadcast, after years of writing continuing drama for TV, and that reaction said I’d written something really truthful and universal.

7. What are you reading right now?

Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah. I’ve had this on my shelf since it first came out; at the time, I probably bought it because I felt I should, but I resisted identifying with it. My dad was born in Shanghai and spent his first fourteen years there, during the Japanese Occupation, civil war, and Communist Revolution. His parents worked in the textile mills, and took the family to Hong Kong just before the Communist takeover in 1949 (although my dad stayed behind at school for a while until they got established, which must have been hard). He died in 1988 and never talked about his past, and I never asked. As a child of mixed heritage, I saw myself as wholly British and just wanted to fit in.

More recently, however, I’ve embarked on a quest to piece together his story and went to Shanghai for the first time last year; I’m going back there soon (geopolitics permitting!), and making my first visit to Hong Kong en route. In preparation, I’m catching up on background reading, although I haven’t found much that describes the everyday lives of the ordinary Chinese – most English-language publications, both fact and fiction, focus on the Western ‘Shanghailanders’ or the wealthy and influential Chinese upper class. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, an academic study by Emily Honig, comes closest to giving me a picture of daily life in the mills of my grandparents’ day, while Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia, based on a series of journalistic interviews, explores the stories of Chinese migrants to the US, who left around the same time as my family.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Bookmarker! Though I never have a proper bookmark, just a leaflet or flyer, whatever’s nearest to hand.

Share

Ming Ho writes for stage, screen, and audio drama. Her play, The Things We Never Said (BBC R4), won the WGGB Best Radio Drama Award, 2018. Other credits include EastEnders, Casualty (BBC TV); Heartbeat, The Bill (ITV); Riot Girls: Male Order (BBC R4), and commissions for LAMDA, RADA, Leeds Playhouse, and Theatr Clwyd.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

In her first blog for the , we heard how Abigail Avis – who also writes as Abigail Mann – managed to complete the first draft of her book, Wet Ink, whilst pregnant with her second child.

This time, Abigail tells us what it was like to manage the editing process alongside caring for a newborn baby, parenting her older child, and attending multiple Zoom meetings…

Subscribe now

I can’t lie to you. Editing is not my favourite part of the writing process. To think that I’m now on the other side of nine drafts with proof pages open on my laptop, typeset and formatted like a real book, is wild when I consider where I started last autumn.

I mentioned in my last essay that I finished Wet Ink, my debut book club novel, after a year in my Fellowship with the RLF and a week before I gave birth to my second daughter. In the month that preceded her arrival, I did an intense round of edits with my agent, Hayley Steed (Janklow & Nesbit). She not only encouraged me to throw everything behind this book, but cheered me across the finish line too. I asked her what that experience was like, and she had this to say:

Share

I had tunnel vision on that finish line, hit send, packed some tiny vests into my hospital bag, and turned my attention to the small matter of getting the baby out of my body and into my arms.

When she was a few weeks old, Wet Ink went out on submission. I’ll try and paint a picture of the weeks that followed. I was so lucky, beyond my wildest dreams, to have multiple editors wanting to acquire it. I took meetings and nursed the baby, desperately trying to listen to their campaign ideas whilst simultaneously tuning into the breathing and chugging sounds of my daughter, worrying that a hiccup would result in a boardroom of publishers witnessing her vomit into my lap. It was rapid and exciting and a slightly insane time on account of the lack of sleep and accompanying adrenaline. In those meetings, editors shared their thoughts with me on what direction they’d take with a structural edit and whether that aligned with my own ideas of what I hoped the book would achieve.

It is so important to find an editor who has a clarity of vision and who you get on with. The other thing that I didn’t anticipate, but appreciate so much now, is that I wanted to be challenged by my editor. I wanted Wet Ink to sing and I know from experience that when your head is resisting a change, it’s because you absolutely need to make it. That is where good editors come in. Lucy Steward and Jo Dickinson (Hodder & Stoughton) met with my US editor Cassidy Sachs (Dutton) to align notes and deliver a joint editorial letter. I asked what they were looking for at this developmental stage, and here’s what Lucy said:

Share

After we decided on delivery dates for the manuscript I got to work, but first I had to figure out what to do with the baby. She was nine weeks old when I started editing. She’s nine months old today and I’m at the very final stage of the process, checking for commas and switching out the odd word. I used part of my advance to pay for childcare, and jumped between the living room and a small desk at the other side of the flat, editing for as long as she was asleep, stopping mid-sentence to come through and breastfeed her, the scene shifts and point of view ticking over in my head as I waited for her to unlatch. I called in a lot of favours. Neighbours would take the children for a few hours, my partner and I swapped the baby like a relay baton, and grandparents clubbed in to give me as much time as possible to edit.

The characters, arcs, and sub-plots are more distinct now. Some of them have been removed entirely. The prose is sharper, the opening line having been re-written more times than I can count. As it stands, the book that appears on the shelf in February 2027 will be the tenth draft. Five or six structural edits, another couple of copy edits, and the final passes making up the total.

In the summer, we’ll be six months out from publication and I’ll be able to share details of how the cover was designed, how international rights work, and what preparation I’ve been doing for talking about this book in front of a crowd.

Until then, I’ve got a PDF to go through for the final (final!) time. Not daunting at all!

Share

Abigail Avis (who also writes as Abigail Mann) is a London-based author and writing tutor, working with university students to sharpen their words as a Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She has a keen interest in women that fell between the cracks of the swinging sixties, especially those who initiated domestic revolutions in surprising and brilliant ways. Her debut book club novel, Wet Ink, will be published in February 2027.

Read part one of our four-part blog series, Abigail Avis on writing ‘Wet Ink’:

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

Fowler’s Modern English Usage. It is idiosyncratic and not always easy to find your way around, but it is full of sound, authoritative advice on how to write correctly and well.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

I am retired, so I no longer have a writing day. When I was working, I generally tried to get to my desk early in the morning to leave afternoons free for gardening. (We have a large garden that wants to be a wilderness.) But, as with most nonfiction writers, much of the time I wasn’t at my desk at all, but away from home doing research, so there wasn’t really a typical day, which was, of course, one of the perks of the job.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

My dear, saintly wife. If she hadn’t been willing to run the household alone for much of the time, I could never have gone off to do the interesting and exciting work I did.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

Brace yourself: critics can be nasty.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

It’s more an observation than advice, but my favourite comment on writing was by Thomas Mann, who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

Being made an honorary fellow of the Royal Society and having the Durham University library named after me.

7. What are you reading right now?

I have just flown home from Australia, and I have a longstanding habit of reading a Patrick O’Brian novel on really long haul flights. I don’t know any books I can sink into more reliably to help the hours pass. The one I have just finished was The Yellow Admiral.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Folder.

Share

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He is the author of eighteen books and holds the record of having the most bestsellers of any author on the Sunday Times bestseller list in the last fifty years. A Short History of Nearly Everything, first published in 2003, spent 106 weeks in the chart, won both the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize and is the biggest-selling popular science book of the twenty-first century.

Bill Bryson is a former Chancellor of Durham University and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society. He lives in England.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This month, Collected: The Podcasts host Ann Morgan was joined by playwright, scriptwriter and producer Sara Shaarawi, who discussed her “accidental” route into writing.

Meanwhile, cult author and RLF beneficiary Hanif Kureishi talked to Paul Dodgson about working with David Bowie, why he has given up listening to music, and how he has rebuilt his writing process after the fall that left him paralysed in 2022.

Listen:

Share

Listen:

Share

The RLF’s Collected: The Podcast delves into the vibrant world of contemporary writers. Our presenters talk to guests from a variety of writing backgrounds, offering a deeper and more nuanced perspective on the writing journey, we go beyond the surface often presented in the media.

Season Two of Collected: The Podcast will be out later this summer, with new episodes released fortnightly. You can hear them all at podcast.rlf.org.uk, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

I believe we should read what we love, that’s all. No rules or recommendations, we are all different.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

Wake up around 6 am: lie there and think. My husband brings me a cup of tea in bed.

Breakfast at 7.30 am

Yoga, fifteen minutes.

Then writing, writing, writing, til 12 noon. Then lunch.

1-2 pm: Walk in the Fens for an hour, where I will see a hare, buzzard, deer, egret – once, even an otter – and feel restored.

2- 5 pm: Reading, Zoom mentoring if I have a Gold Dust student or reading, talking.

5- 8 pm: Faff about. Phone a friend.

Thinking (about my novel)

Make dinner and eat it.

After 8 pm, I tend to be very stupid, and we won’t talk about this.

I once read Ursula Le Guin’s description of her writing day and thought, “Wow, mine is very similar.” Those last two lines above are from Ursula Le Guin’s day, and are the ones that made me smile.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

The writers I read in my twenties: Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Ronald Blythe, TS Eliot. They all had an indelible impact on me and made me want to write. Also, Mr Foggin in the sixth form, who encouraged me when my parents most certainly didn’t.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

Oh god, how much waiting I would do. Waiting to hear back. Waiting to be paid. Waiting for a book to come out. Waiting to hear from your agent. Waiting, waiting. I am not a patient person.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

My favourite advice was never given to me (sadly), but is the comment by Joni Mitchell: “I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is necessary to be an artist.”

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

I hope it’s yet to come! But I was very proud to get an honorary doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University in 2006 because my mum and my youngest son got to come, and they were gazing at me throughout my speech, and when the recitation about my work was read out. I really did feel proud that day.

7. What are you reading right now?

To start: An Arrow in Flight: a new short story collection by Mary Lavin.

Halfway through: The Occult Sylvia Plath by Julia Gordon Bramer.

Just finished Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (with an excellent introduction by RLF Fellow Carole Angier).

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Are you kidding!!!! Who folds pages?

Share

Jill Dawson has won many prizes for poetry, short stories and fiction and has been publishing since she was twenty-three. She is the editor of six anthologies, including the bestselling Virago Book of Wicked Verse. She has eleven novels published by Sceptre, which include Fred & Edie, The Great Lover, The Crime Writer, The Language of Birds and The Bewitching. Her RLF Fellowship was at the University of East Anglia in 2001; she later became the creative-writing fellow and taught on the MA programme. Jill founded Gold Dust Mentoring which helps new writers reach publication. She was Chair of the Advisory Fellows for the RLF for twelve years and led the induction day for New Fellows. Her twelfth novel, Pixie, is “a captivating story of the most famous occult artist you’ve never heard of” (Paula Hawkins) and is published by Bloomsbury in March 2026.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

Earlier this year Crown of Blood, playwright and RLF Fellow Oladipo ‘Dipo’ Agboluaje’s Yoruba adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, opened at The Crucible, Sheffield’s renowned production theatre, before beginning a UK tour.

A co-production by Sheffield Theatres and Utopia Theatre, a leading voice in African theatre led by Founder and Artistic Director Mojisola Kareem, Crown of Blood takes the central story of Macbeth and transports it into 19th-century Yorubaland.

But for Dipo, the inspiration for Crown of Blood went much further than the oft-told tale of murderous Macbeth and his calculating wife – as he explains:

Subscribe now

I had previously worked with director Mojisola Kareem on a play based on her relationship with her grandmother, mother and her daughter, titled Here’s What She Said to Me. The play spanned generations and continents and was both epic and intimate. Our collaboration was based on detailed research and workshops, which included all the principal creatives from the conception stage, which is Mojisola’s practice. Mojisola’s company, Utopia Theatre, is the resident company at the Crucible in Sheffield. When she asked me to adapt Macbeth to a Yoruba setting, I said yes without reservation. In a sense I was destined to write a play like Crown of Blood.

I was born in Hackney, East London. Returning to Nigeria in the seventies, the epic dramas on television stoked my interest in Yoruba culture, history, and folklore. Up until then, to my classmates, I was the new boy from London who spoke funny and was always reading stories about Greek and Norse mythology, and devouring American and British comic books like Battle, Tiger and Scorcher and Whizzer and Chips during lunch break. One particular play, Duro Ladipo’s Oba Koso (The King Did Not Hang), was a dramatic imagining of the story of Sango, King of Oyo, later deified as the God of Thunder. I still remember that night in Ibadan, where it seemed the whole city gathered around TV sets to watch the adaptation of this legendary stage play. It triggered a feeling in me that I never got from Greek and Norse mythology. For the first time, I understood myself to be part of a cosmological landscape unique to my people and me.

At the University of Benin, where I studied theatre arts, I read epics such as Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, Kurunmi and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi; Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile; and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. Pedro Obaseki, a former student who returned to teach at the university, wrote and produced his own historical epic, Obaseki. By this time, I had decided I wanted to be a playwright, and, gathering these influences, the dream was to one day write my own epic.

Before Crown of Blood, I had written an adaptation of The Tempest titled Knock Against My Heart, for Theatre Centre in collaboration with the Rio-based company Nos Do Morro. Directed by Michael Judge, we worked with a cast of Brazilian and British actors to create the story and performance mode that incorporated two dramatic traditions. The Brazilian actors relied as much on the physical as the verbal to tell the story. African cultures, especially Yoruba culture, heavily influence Brazilian culture. Therefore, the adaptation was an engagement between Africa and its European and South American diasporas.

Share

Crown of Blood’s development began with a weeklong workshop at the Crucible. I submitted three scenes for us to work out the style of the play. In the room at this early phase with the actors were the sound designer, the choreographer and the musician. We also had Lekan Balogun, a playwright, dramaturg, and cultural consultant, and Ajide Adeyemi, a babalawo (diviner) who was our consultant on Yoruba spiritual practices. The workshop was designed to ensure everyone was on the same page about the play’s aesthetic: an immersive Yoruba drama that would play to a diverse audience in the UK without diluting its authenticity.

I took the spine of Shakespeare’s play – of a man, along with his wife, conspiring to seize the crown after a prophecy reveals he will be king. The big question for me was how the spine would work in 19th-century Yorubaland, with its unique cultural and political setting. I took a deep dive into Yoruba history, devouring journal essays about the period and seminal texts like Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas. I identified what was possible within the world of my story and began to work out a structure and shape the characters. I also watched many Yoruba-language epic dramas.

From these sources emerged the backdrop of the 19th-century Yoruba civil wars, a period of internal conflict within the Oyo empire. Aderemi, a general and war hero, is given a prophecy that he will become king. Unknown to him, the prophecy is false, a scheme cooked up by his wife Oyebisi and her desire to take revenge upon the empire for enslaving her and destroying her home during the empire’s war of expansion. This meant that Oyebisi would be more involved in the action than Lady Macbeth. As a disquisition on the nature of power and ambition within a Yoruba philosophical framework, and given that a major attribute of African drama is that it is a communal event, the other characters are featured prominently. This gave the story a three-dimensional quality, providing audiences with a survey of the society at the time without unnecessary exposition.

Share

An important consideration was how to stage the spirit world to reflect the belief system, and how and when the ancestors and deities intervene in human affairs. We had to represent the circular cosmology of the Yoruba of humans, ancestors, deities and the unborn and how the relationship between them drives the action as much as human agency. It was all done through action. The dialogue was purposive and therefore clear in statingthe intentions of the characters. Combined with the set, lighting, costume, music and sound, the stages of the Crucible and later the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry were transformed into a space where such a world could credibly exist.

Adapting Macbeth has been a special endeavour. It has allowed me to fulfil my dream of writing a Yoruba epic. I have engaged with it through other versions, particularly Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, whose title mine echoes, and Orson Welles’s expressionistic version. Most of all, it has solidified my attitude towards adaptations, that the original must bend to the concerns and aesthetics of a new setting, and that the adaptor must see it as one text in conversation with many others, to make us see it in a new light.

Share

Oladipo ‘Dipo’ Agboluaje is a playwright and academic. His first play Early Morning was produced in 2003 at Oval House Theatre in South London; it was followed by a string of original plays, adaptations and radio plays. His first collection of plays, Plays One, was published by Oberon in 2014. His writing deals with identity and belonging, and the African Diasporic condition. He is the 2009 winner of the Alfred Fagon prize for playwriting for his play Iya-Ile (The First Wife). Iya-Ile was also nominated for an Olivier Award that same year. Set in Nigeria during military rule, Iya-Ile is a prequel to his 2006 play The Estate. Oladipo has also published a number of poems and short stories. He now finds himself writing more for young audiences, setting plays in alternate worlds. His influences for this crop of work stems from a youth spent devouring science fiction and fantasy novels, and comic books. He reviews essay submissions for the African Performance Review journal and has taught creative writing and post-colonial theatre at several universities. His interests include supporting Arsenal football club and travelling. He lives in South London.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

By rights Ronald Blythe, born into poverty in 1922, should have been a beneficiary rather than a benefactor of the Royal Literary Fund. But over a century of frugal and fruitful life, he had good reason to conclude that others were far less fortunate than himself.

Ronnie, as he wanted everyone to call him, was the eldest of six surviving children of a Suffolk farmworker turned grave-digger and a nursing assistant from the London slum that was Covent Garden. His paternal line ran through centuries of wandering shepherds. They were astronomers, naturalists and guardians of folklore – impoverished and enriched.

The Blythes’ only permanent book was the King James Bible, where Ronnie found his faith and love of language. Otherwise, he imbibed library loans. The author of short-story and essay collections, novels, poetry, memoirs, anthologies, literary criticism and social history – the best of 40 titles appearing from his 80th year – would never have published anything without public libraries.

He also learned from looking, listening, walking and dreaming. His home in East Anglia between the wars was a wonderland of natural and cultural profusion. A boy who felt kinship with saints, local but long-gone painters Gainsborough and Constable, and sundry literary characters was thought to be away with the fairies.

Having been ejected from school at 14, Ronnie worked in a bookshop and then, since all the qualified people were busy with the war, as a Colchester librarian. The library became his university. As he read and read, he wrote: untrained, unconstrained.

His voice was invented, the Suffolk burr jettisoned for the cut-glass diction of a BBC-style commentator, which smoothed like sea-glass as he became wholly himself as a writer. Distance was needed from all he wished to depict – most notably the harrowing experiences of rural life in the internationally acclaimed Akenfield – to make the personal universal and avoid any idea of self-pity. He could never quite believe his luck.

Share

Two key guides were encountered in the library. The artist Christine Nash led him to the enchanted world of Bottengoms in Wormingford, an ancient farmhouse in a spring-watered dell where her painter husband John Nash was making a plantsman’s paradise.

Ronnie joined the enchantment, tending to house, cats and garden, and later to the frail custodians, before the refuge passed to him. Christine prised him from the library and into a beach cottage near Aldeburgh, where he worked on an initial novel and met E.M. Forster.

But a lightning bolt struck one morning in the library, when a colleague pointed out a poet. Tall, silver-voiced James Turner had ethereally pale skin against cheeks flaming red. The image of a masculine martyr, and to Ronnie a figure of wild romance, hid the trials of tuberculosis amid wrestles with finance.

His nurse was now his wife. Her name had changed from Lucie to Cathy when a writer in thrall to Wuthering Heights perceived the heroine of his stricken life. Ronnie added token tributes of beer, typewriter ribbons and razor blades, as well as endless adulation.

Share

No mean poet when he put his mind to it, Turner was more often writing and broadcasting for cash. He was always on the move in East Anglia, then in Cornwall, chasing greener fields and windfalls from property sales.

As a mentor he proved a very mixed blessing – homophobic and resentful of Ronnie’s brightening reputation as his own small star faded. But an acolyte remained steadfast, lending literary and secretarial help and winning support from the Royal Literary Fund. When Turner died aged 66 in 1975, Ronnie secured more RLF backing for his widow. He never forgot his debt to a flawed guru. “I based my life on his freedom,” he said at 90.

I myself fell for the enchantment of Bottengoms in 1988, seeking a foreword for my first art book from East Anglia’s great man of letters. Our friendship lasted for 35 years. I became a carer and contributed to Next to Nature: A Life in the English Countryside, the volume of selected Blythe writings and homages from friends and fans marking his centenary. When he died, two months later, it was a best-seller.

We told his story together in Blythe Spirit: The Remarkable Life of Ronald Blythe (John Murray). Some were surprised by the physical revelations of a gay man so at ease in his own skin. I had been taken aback only by the life-long impact of early poverty. By the end, he seemed to gain from everything he lacked.

The library pension he cashed on launching as a writer was never spent. Literary income, however meagre, exceeded his needs until he retired at 94. He lived happily without the things most of us take for granted (mains plumbing, car, computer, mobile phone). A sole extravagance lay in shunning water for sherry.

I tapped several savings accounts to keep him at home as he wished; the estate lawyer found lots more. Essex Wildlife Trust inherited Bottengoms and almost £500,000. A rescue plan for a creative retreat, nature reserve and educational resource for sustainable living in the landscape, is wonderfully underway.

The Blythe archive has gone to the British Library and Christine Nash’s paintings to Tate. Resurgent royalties are passing to the Royal Literary Fund in a final gesture of gratitude to James Turner. He has already found immortality as the poet in Akenfield, a college text on both sides of the Atlantic whose sales have now passed 400,000 in the UK alone.

Ronnie’s appreciative and enlightening life and legacy are all of a piece. My hope is that billowing RLF royalties will help to fuel the beacon that is Bottengoms.

Share

Ian Collins is Ronald Blythe's literary executor. His Blythe Spirit biography won the 2025 New Angle Prize.

Ronald Blythe is one of a number of writers to have left a portion of his Estate to the Royal Literary Fund. You can browse the RLF’s Estates Directory here, and find out more about leaving a legacy to the RLF, including leaving a gift in your will, here.

Screenwriter, author and Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on his writing life.

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

Frustrating. In to my office by 9.30. Why does no writing happen till 11.45, even with no internet?

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

Sam Bain, my friend and long-time writing partner.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

I don’t think there are really many words which have much significance compared to the power of experience. But if some figure with a badge saying ‘Certain Possessor of Objective Truth’ had told me anything useful it might have been, there is a bit more time than you think ahead.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

For screenplay, I like Richard Curtis’ freeing tip of opening eight or ten documents to give yourself a sense of possibility, that you’re not tied to the errors you’re going to make in your first draft, and you can go other ways with the scene in subsequent attempts.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

Hmm. I think getting a second series of Peep Show commissioned felt very significant. It had been in the balance and I think Sam and I felt it was probably about as good as we could do in the sitcom form. We would have been sad to only do one series.

7. What are you reading right now?

A DH Lawrence short story called ‘The Prussian Officer’.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Folder.

Share

Jesse Armstrong is a British author, screenwriter, and producer.

With Sam Bain he co-created and co-wrote 9 seasons of Channel 4’s BAFTA-winning comedy Peep Show. He also co-wrote The Thick of It and Fresh Meat for TV and In the Loop and Four Lions for theatrical release.

Working as a solo writer, Jesse wrote The Entire History of You for Black Mirror and the final episode of the first season of HBO’s Veep.

In 2016 Jonathan Cape published his novel set against the background of the Bosnian War, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals. The New York Times said, “Armstrong proves to be just as maniacally funny here as he is on the screen.”

He was the creator and show-runner of the HBO TV show Succession, and the writer and director of the recent television movie, Mountainhead.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing In the Loop and won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for each of Succession’s four seasons.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Talismans of migration, the fourth edition of The WritersMosaic Quarterly, is out now, available as a print insert in The Bookseller as well as on the WritersMosaic website.

WritersMosaic’s latest publication tells the true-life stories of nine migrants and their descendants who have travelled to the UK, exploring the emotional cost of migration through some of the objects carried across countries and continents.

These physical and emotional ‘talismans’ include a sturdy pink suitcase, a magical toy, a beloved musical instrument and a selection of summer suits. Writers Eric Ngalle Charles, Snežana Ćurčić, Ishy Din, Colin Grant, Suzanne Harrington, Maggie Harris, Maria Jastrzębska, Roger Robinson and Amanda Vilanova reflect on the succour and strength that such objects – the unique talismans of migration – provide: those steadying anchors which provide stability in the face of daunting movement.

Colin Grant, Director of WritersMosaic, also introduces Talismans of migration in the latest print and digital issue of this month’s Bookseller. Read it here.

Share

WritersMosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund, is an online magazine and developmental resource focused on UK writers of the global majority, reflecting the changing reality of contemporary Britain, from its past and into its future. For more original writing from WritersMosaic writers, visit the website.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This month, Collected: The Podcast heard from three fascinating guests – playwright Patricia Cumper MBE, the celebrated former artistic director of Talawa Theatre Company; Katharine Quarmby, novelist, journalist and non-fiction writer; and poet Hugo Williams, a former winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Listen:

Share

Listen:

Share

Listen:

Share

The RLF’s Collected: The Podcast delves into the vibrant world of contemporary writers. Our presenters talk to guests from a variety of writing backgrounds, offering a deeper and more nuanced perspective on the writing journey, we go beyond the surface often presented in the media.

New episodes are released fortnightly. You can hear them all at podcast.rlf.org.uk, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Leave a comment

is an award-winning, global bestselling author of 23 novels. Her latest Kez Lanyon thriller, The Quiet Girls (Headline Review) is out now.

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

The temptation to say one of my books is strong... ; ) I don’t know is the honest answer. I suppose you should look at what type of writing you want to do and then read something in a completely different genre. If you want to be a writer, it’s a good idea to read as widely as possible. The more outside your genre you read, the better your writing will be because you will learn lots of techniques you can apply to your own work.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

I don’t have a typical day because I have so many different things I need to do related to my writing life. I produce at least one book a year, so I am very rarely just writing a book at any one time. On top of writing a book, I’m usually editing another story, trying to promote a different novel, and then organising events or trying to find ways to help other authors. Having said that, when I’m near the end of the writing process or close to a deadline, I pull all-nighters to get the book written. I don’t recommend it though, because it gets physically and mentally harder and harder to do as time goes on.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

I think my parents. My mum taught me to read and write when I was in nursery, and my dad had a lot of books and encouraged us to go to the library, so they both encouraged me in their own ways to explore the storytelling side of my nature

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

That you’re going to get rejected A LOT at every stage of your career, yes, even when you have more than one number one bestselling title to your name. All writers face rejection – it doesn’t make it easier to immediately accept, but it can be comforting to know that you’re not alone and that you can still thrive after someone has said “no” to you. Or in my case, when everyone in the Writers & Artists Yearbook has said “no” to you. Twice. So I wish someone had told me that you’ll get rejected A LOT, that it will sting, but you have to keep going.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

That I need to put clues in that the main character of my novel is Black. It was a lesson that, as a Black working-class woman writer, the industry is going to ask things of me that they won’t ask of other people who aren’t at these intersections. It was unintentional but very valuable advice as it turned out, because it encouraged me to not allow other people’s unreasonable expectations and stereotypes to stop me creating the stories that I want to tell.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

I am someone who tends to celebrate the opening of an envelope so I find a lot of joy in many moments of my career. I suppose, though, some of my proudest moments have been hearing from readers how my books have helped them feel less alone or make sense of their reality and the things that have happened to them. That says I’ve done good by telling my stories.

7. What are you reading right now?

Am in the middle of writing a book, so the only thing I’m reading are crochet patterns.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Neither. I’m a “try to remember the page and then have to flick back and forth to find where I left off-er”.

Share

Dorothy Koomson is an award-winning, global bestselling author of 23 novels, with a writing career spanning more than 20 years. Her novels include the Sunday Times bestsellers I Know What You’ve Done, Tell Me Your Secret, The Brighton Mermaid, The Friend, The Ice Cream Girls, The Woman He Loved Before, The Chocolate Run and My Best Friend’s Girl. Her new novel, The Quiet Girls, was published on 12 March 2026.

Dorothy’s thrillers have been translated into more than 30 languages and are regular Sunday Times bestsellers with sales of over 2.5 million copies in the UK alone. Her novels The Ice Cream Girls and The Rose Petal Beach were both shortlisted for the British Book Awards in 2010 and 2013, respectively. A TV adaptation loosely based on The Ice Cream Girls was first shown on ITV1 in 2013, and two of her other books have been optioned by Hollywood stars.

In 2021, Dorothy also featured on the Powerlist as one of the most influential Black people in Britain, and she has appeared in GQ Style as a Black British trailblazer, and was a judge for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is currently a judge for the 2026 Women’s Prize Discoveries award.

She believes passionately that everyone should have the opportunity to tell their story and regularly mentors aspiring authors.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

For many writers, getting a book deal is hard enough – but have you ever wondered what happens after the ink dries on that much-coveted contract?

Over the next few months, – who also writes as Abigail Mann – will take us behind the scenes as she navigates the run-up to the publication of her new novel, Wet Ink, described as a “striking, smart and sensual bookclub novel.” From drafting the book while pregnant to juggling publishing deadlines, Zoom calls and meetings, and the everyday reality of parenthood, Abigail will share the process with us as we countdown to the publication of Wet Ink in 2027.

Subscribe now

Last year, my life changed exponentially, twice. The first time was in August, 2025, when my second daughter was born at the tail end of a heatwave. The second was in October, when the book I wrote sold at auction in the UK, the USA, a further seventeen territories, and to a TV production company, all in the space of a few weeks. In isolation, each of these events would be enough to feel like my world had tilted on its axis, but there was something uniquely surreal about them happening simultaneously. It turns out that living with a newborn, a toddler, and having to talk with some semblance of coherency about your novel across time zones is a pretty wild way to enter the postpartum period. We’ll get to that, I promise, because I’m going to be documenting the journey of my novel as it winds its way to publication over the next year. For now, I’m going to dial back and tell you about how and why I wrote Wet Ink, my debut book club novel that will be published in Spring 2027.

To start with, you must know that I am no stranger to the world of publishing. Over the past eight years, I wrote, felt joy, and grew jaded as an author. Things have not been easy. I struggled to afford nursery when my first baby was seven months old. I wrote a novel to length and then abandoned it in the throes of early motherhood because it just did not work. Or perhaps, most accurately, I did not work anymore. I seriously questioned whether having a baby broke my brain, and again questioned whether it was possible to sustain any kind of writing life when my ability to concentrate was in constant competition with the urge to sleep. Becoming a mother has been the greatest and most unexpected joy, but it has altered me at every level, not just through the pragmatics of getting words down on the page, but what kind of story I actually want to tell with the increasingly limited time I have. By the time I managed to – somewhat – detangle myself from my wonderful, fierce daughter, I realised that I owed it to her, and myself, to be braver with my writing. The thing that held me back was stressful and mundane. It all came down to finances.

I think this is important to say, because there is a lot of terrible writing advice out there, a one-size-fits-all approach to success that made me choke on my coffee as I reflected on how badly it related to my own life. Write for one hour every day. Curate a dedicated writing desk. Block out time alone in your week to write. “The bliss of solitude”, as Wordsworth writes, was a foreign land to me. I have always worked alongside writing, but trying to squeeze it all in – motherhood, working, writing – often felt frantic, like I couldn’t do any one thing very well. Then, two things changed that helped me to write Wet Ink. Boredom, and my RLF Fellowship at the University of Greenwich.

The first is important because boredom really is underrated, and although it doesn’t feel like an efficient use of time, it was pivotal for me. My story, about Mitzy Barlow, a bored housewife in 1969 London who writes and delivers erotic fiction inside the Tupperware containers she sells at parties, is a story that came to me during midnight hours nursing my baby, when I couldn’t do anything but sit and think. Over time, I added scenes each night until the moment came, months later, when I wrote it down as a rushed outline on paper. I did not follow a beat sheet, but I did slowly add bricks to the idea until it felt stable enough to stand up on its own. Then, my RLF Fellowship allowed me to put meat on the bones of that idea without worrying quite so much about how to pay the bills. For the first time, an organisation unquestionably understood that, for mothers to write, they need support. In order for me to take a leap of faith with a new novel, I needed that safety net beneath me.

Disappearing to my tiny office in Greenwich was like one big, long breath out. Students would book in to see me, and between those tutorials, I would add words, on the quad, on the train, in doctors’ waiting rooms, anywhere and everywhere I kept adding to the manuscript. At 30,000 words in, I stopped for a week to check in on the direction of the outline, and at the same time realised I was pregnant. I had been here before and knew that if I didn’t finish the book before I gave birth, I wouldn’t finish it for another two years. I didn’t want to wait that long. The momentum of the academic year and my ever-protruding belly kept me going until I finished the manuscript. I like a hard deadline, and this one was as hard as it gets.

There is a book that I kept coming back to during this time, like a sage pal in my pocket who had been there before. The Baby on the Fire Escape, written by Julie Phillips, which collects the accounts of artist mothers, and, as she terms it, the Mind-Baby Problem. Here was evidence that I could write, could finish this book that had so much to say about desire, the female gaze, and what it means to live as yourself, as a writer, and as a mother:

Alice Walker saw her daughter in her mind’s eye as she worked, “the lonely sucking of her thumb / a giant stopper in my throat…” Imagine Naomi Mitchison in a London park, writing on a board balanced on her pram. Think of Shirley Jackson making plot notes in the kitchen while dinner was on the stove; Toni Morrison driving to work with a pad of paper in the car so that she could write whenever the traffic slowed. Here the act of writing is not continuous but provisional, contingent, subject to disruption—and yet the words are still coming and the work is getting done.

The Baby on the Fire Escape, Julie Phillips, 2022

I finished Wet Ink a week before I gave birth. I wonder sometimes whether my daughter held on until I was ready. Within weeks of her arrival earthside, she was coming to meetings with me at publishing houses, and I lost all sense of what was normal, but we’ll save that for next time, shall we?

Share

Abigail Avis (who also writes as Abigail Mann) is a London-based author and writing tutor, working with university students to sharpen their words as a Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She has a keen interest in women that fell between the cracks of the swinging sixties, especially those who initiated domestic revolutions in surprising and brilliant ways. Her debut book club novel, Wet Ink, will be published in February 2027.

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

There were so many inspiring and formative books for me, and I’m still finding them. But for insights into how, why, where and when writers do what they do, how they started out and how they keep going, then for me it’s hard to beat the Paris Review interviews. They have been going for 70 years and counting. Their archive holds hundreds of interviews with writers from Ernest Hemingway to Elizabeth Bishop, Joan Didion to James Baldwin, Harold Pinter to Toni Morrison. Their paperback selections – around twenty interviews per book – were regular reads for me when I was starting out, and I still dip into them now.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

I have in my head a platonic form of my writing day, in which I do four hours of distraction-free writing in the early morning, followed by a workout, reading for research, reading for pleasure… But in truth, most of my work is in poetry, and poems tend to resist the novelists’ ‘x hours a day, every day’ method. I know some poets who write daily, but I have days when I can’t stop writing, and days when I can’t start. I’ve learned to accept the unpredictability of that, at least when writing poems. In other forms – nonfiction, scripts, words for music – I can get into more of a daily routine, and a deadline helps to focus the mind.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

I didn’t know any writers when I was growing up (wasn’t sure poets still existed) but knew I wanted to write. Like a lot of writers, I had an inspirational English teacher at my comprehensive school who made poems light up on the page as we were reading them in class. When I was about 15 I showed him a (terrible) poem I’d just written, and he went through – line-by-line – saying ‘that’s a cliché, that’s a cliché… etc, then got to one line and said ‘that’s a great line, that’s you’. I’ve always been grateful that he took my desire to write seriously enough to critique it honestly, and to pick out something to build on. It would have been much easier for him to say it was wonderful but I wouldn’t have believed him.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

Lots of things, though I don’t think anything would have put me off. I’ve always had a day job, as most poets do, but increasingly it’s true of novelists, playwrights and many other writers, as it’s harder than ever to make a living from writing alone. I wish I’d been told that the writing itself doesn’t get any easier, but this is what makes it the best work I can imagine doing. The poet Robert Graves (in his Paris Review interview) said ‘a perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.’ So, in the meantime, we can keep pushing at it.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

Finish the first draft.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

The moment of greatest joy (I’m not sure about pride) in my writing life came in my twenties – at the end of a bad day at work – when I picked up a voicemail from a publisher saying they wanted to publish my first book of poems.

7. What are you reading right now?

Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy, Lamorna Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever and Tishani Doshi’s ‘Egrets, While War’, all for work and pleasure.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Both, plus yellow post-it tabs. I write in books too, but only in pencil.

Share

Michael Symmons Roberts is a British poet, born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. His books of poetry have won many awards including the Forward Prize (2013) and the Costa Poetry Award for Drysalter (2013) and the Whitbread Poetry Prize for Corpus(2004). His Selected Poems was published by Cape in 2016. As a librettist, his work with composers has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. The Sacrifice (for Welsh National Opera) with composer James MacMillan, won an RPS Award for opera, and their Royal Opera House / Scottish Opera commission – Clemency – was nominated for an Olivier Award. Elliptics (for BBC Philharmonic) and The Anvil (for Manchester International Festival) with composer Emily Howard, were both nominated for Ivor Novello Awards. Non-fiction book Edgelands (with Paul Farley, 2011) won the Foyles Book of Ideas Award and the Jerwood Prize. He is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest book – Quartet for the End of Time – was published by Cape in 2025, and his ninth collection of poems – Dog Star – will be published in early 2026.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on the RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

Statistics released recently in connection with this year’s National Year of Reading show a significant drop in reading enjoyment and frequency among children. For RLF Fellow and children’s author Karen McCombie, these issues are concerning but not particularly surprising – and for children’s authors in general, they also reflect a growing conflict: the difficulty of making a living within this challenging publishing landscape, whilst also supporting initiatives to get children reading.

Subscribe now

And so it begins…

The National Year of Reading 2026 is well underway. Instigated by the Department of Education, and led by the National Literacy Trust, the campaign came about after statistics revealed a huge slump in reading for pleasure in the UK population over a 20-year period. The push to get people reading again is supported by everyone from the Big Five publishers to tiny rural primary schools, from sports stars to celebrities, from the Royal Literary Fund to the Queen’s Reading Room charity.

The campaign is aimed at the whole population with even the HM Prison and Probation Service getting onboard, but inevitably the main focus is on children. After all, get bitten by the reading bug as a child, and you’re very likely to be a reader for life. Specific statistics for this cohort are enlightening as well as depressing. According to a recent study by the National Literacy Trust, reading enjoyment amongst children and teens (aged 8-18) in 2005 stood at 68.7%, but by 2025 that had dropped to 32.7%. When it came to reading frequency, the daily reading habit had slipped from 38.7% to just 18.7%. More disappointingly still, a recent research project by HarperCollins UK found that while 64% of children aged 0-4 were being read to frequently in 2012, that number had fallen to 41% by 2024.

What’s behind the figures? It’s no surprise that the lure of technology and social media bear the brunt of the blame. Another issue currently being studied by Nottingham Trent University, in conjunction with the University of Minnesota, highlights the fact that many parents interpret the act of reading to their children as an ‘educational task’ rather than something fun, bonding and comforting. In other words, a chore.

Share

The viewpoint of these parents certainly chimes with the chat in children’s author groups I belong to. Discussions have pointed the finger at many schools’ preference for reading scheme books rather than free choice, so what’s brought home may be seen as a worthy ‘educational’ option than an enjoyable activity. It’s also been mentioned quite vociferously that since 2011, when then Minister for Education Michael Gove decreed that the teaching of subjects such as English should be more ‘rigorous’, there’s been a shift to pummelling primary age children with the sledgehammer of intricate grammar rules and the testing of that knowledge. As a child of the 70s, I feel lucky that the focus then was about learning grammar by osmosis; by listening to, sharing and reading stories, absorbing sentence structures by immersion and not almost by rote. Whether it’s authors like me who’ve been around a long time, or younger debut authors, we all agree that having to know about fronted adverbials is a killer to freely enjoying stories for their own sake.

I mention these chats in (private) children’s author groups to show that while we aim to write the best books we can and earn a living from it, we are all undoubtedly invested in children’s lives and literacy. Outward-facing, you’ll see us on social media, talking about our own books, naturally, but also – and more often – recommending other authors’ books to various gatekeepers of children’s reading options. How amazing it is to work in a creative world, while being able to do actual good in our field.

However, this altruism can be a heavy load. Prior to the recession of 2008/2009, many children’s authors had a full-time – if not necessarily particularly lucrative – career. Book advances from publishers accounted for the main part of our earnings, but school and library author visits were another income stream, with the added option of children buying personally signed copies to treasure, which in turn helped support our work. It felt that our right to earn a living from children’s books sat comfortably with our altruistic concern for our audience.

Share

After that period, the landscape began to change. Many publishers offered half the advances they had previously. School and library budgets were slashed. Invitations to visit and inspire children dwindled. As for making a living as a full-time author, that’s very much a rarity now – most authors have a day job to pay the bills.

What hasn’t changed is the consideration children’s authors feel towards young people. We value the keen readers, while encouraging the struggling and reluctant readers. We think about their circumstances and life experiences. We understand their need to see themselves represented in fiction, as well as being aware of how beneficial it can be in terms of empathy to walk in other’s shoes within a story. Ultimately, it’s a no-brainer; we children’s authors will always care, and we’ll always do our best, but nowadays this altruism is coming at a cost. Increasingly, we’re expected to work for nothing; to do it for the kids. An enthusiastic invitation arrives from a school, and nothing comes of it after you mention a fee and travel costs. Or we have a visit confirmed but are told that our books won’t be offered for sale, as it’s not fair on children whose families can’t afford them in the current climate. In addition, requests regularly arrive from cash-strapped schools asking for free copies of our books, or we’re asked to do a ‘short’ inspirational video about x, y and z for free. Now that the National Year of Reading has arrived, these requests have ramped up considerably, as I’m seeing from both my own inbox and friends’ posts on author chat groups.

I think I can safely say we children’s authors are torn. If we could, we’d be right there, giving it our all. To coin the National Year of Reading slogan, we’d go all in. But clearly, the hard truth is that the vast majority of us don’t earn shiny amounts of money from our beloved career, or have – literally – the free time to fulfil requests.

One beacon of hope on the horizon is the recently announced Children’s Booker Prize from . The inaugural award, with a hefty £50,000 prize, opens to submissions in spring 2026. The winner will be announced in February 2027, after being selected by a panel of both child and adult judges chaired by UK Children’s Laureate Frank Cotterell-Boyce. At least 30,000 copies of the shortlisted and winning books will be gifted to children.

Here’s hoping that the push of the National Year of Reading and a prestigious Booker Award will go some way towards changing the creeping perception of children’s authors being benevolent and comfortably well-off aunties and uncles to that of actual creators who should be valued, both in terms of talent and funding.

In the meantime, despite our squashed and squeezed financial and time constraints, of course we children’s authors will absolutely keep on doing it for the kids.

Share

Karen McCombie has had more than 100 children’s books published in a career spanning 25 years. She writes in a variety of genres, from contemporary – such as the much-loved and best-selling Ally’s World of the early 2000s – to her current historical adventure novel My Family The Enemy (2025), based on the true story of civil internment during WW1. Interestingly, these bookends to her career so far are set around London’s iconic Alexandra Palace, close to where she lives with her family.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Earlier this month , celebrated nature writer and farmer, joined Collected presenter Jonathan Tulloch to reflect on his singular creative processes and why rewilding may not always be a good thing – plus, how he learnt to speak ‘dog’.

Listen:

Share

Meanwhile Emma John, journalist and memoirist, spoke with Paul Dodgson about her writing process – including creating a writing ‘panic room’, and when it is acceptable to tweak facts in non-fiction.

Listen:

Share

The RLF’s Collected: The Podcast delves into the vibrant world of contemporary writers. Our presenters talk to guests from a variety of writing backgrounds, offering a deeper and more nuanced perspective on the writing journey, we go beyond the surface often presented in the media.

New episodes are released fortnightly. You can hear them all at podcast.rlf.org.uk, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

An impossible question to answer. Especially as I’m easily led by whoever is my favourite author of the moment. So, I’m answering this question from a number of perspectives.

1. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King – I like his warm and unpretentious guidance, and he is, after all, an incredible storyteller.

2. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter – for sheer lyrical beauty and rule-breaking. She influenced me on multiple levels in my obsession with looking beyond the ordinary and discreetly inspiring my first novel, Nancy Jones and the Show of Wonders (still unpublished).

3. Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin – yes, I started with the rude ones because she wrote about women and desires in a way that unleashed the possibilities of a sexual life to my innocent eyes. I’m also obsessed with her journals, which inspired me to start my own in 1979.

4. Kindred by Octavia Butler – another magnificent storyteller, much of what she writes I relate to, for different reasons of othering, which shows that the roots of prejudice share commonalities.

5. The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires, co-authored by Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies – yes, I am a contributor, and I’m proud. The book was revolutionary and is still worth reading, over twenty years later, for the insight it offers into the most human aspect of being a disabled person: the need to be loved and desired.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

As a disabled writer, I use a combination of voice dictation software and an actual human being, which means my writing days are organised around access needs. I start at 11:30 am and finish at 4 pm, aiming for three days per week. Around this, I’m naturally given to endless scribbles in a hundred tiny notebooks, diaries and scraps of paper. As a night owl, despite the protestations of my body demanding rest, I will often do fast dictations on my phone while in bed. I handwrite slowly. This can be a positive, as it allows for steady, instinctive thinking, particularly for poetry, although naturally there’s never enough time to get what I want onto paper or screen.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

I want to start by thanking the first influential figure in my life, my English teacher, Mrs Marsh. Around the age of thirteen, stuck in an institution, part-school, part-hospital, she was the first person to tell me I had the signs of genuine talent as a writer. It’s impossible to pick out other individuals easily. Rosemary Sutcliff is worth mentioning, even though our work is very different. She was, at least, a disabled writer who, in my youth, urged me on. In reality, though, it has been a long, lonely journey – that is, finding who will listen to my pet passion, revealing the disability narrative within fiction.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

Patience is everything, in parallel with accepting the hard graft and resisting the fantasy of fast, overnight success stories.

5. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

Rosemary Sutcliff told me, ‘Never give up.’ Others have said value what you do, but always be open to learning. I’ve liked being told the best writers, including Shakespeare, made mistakes – you can even go and see them in the British Library! More recently, my lovely friend, author Jake Arnott, says to always write for yourself first, and ignore all the fuss that, these days, can come with it – i.e. social media, PR, etc.

Share

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

I was reluctant, initially, to write a memoir because there’s a sad history of disabled writers becoming a one-trick pony when coaxed into writing about ‘My Life’, too easily drawn into either stereotypes of misery memoir, or triumph over tragedy, to then largely disappear as a writer once the ‘novelty’ factor has gone. However, through trusted friends on the edges of publishing, I was encouraged to realise I had a rich story outside of being ‘merely disabled’. This led to the publication of my memoir, First in the World Somewhere, by Unbound in 20171, through the support of Becky Swift, founder of The Literary Consultancy. I did enjoy the excitement the publication generated and the help of various champions at Unbound. There was a pre-launch at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. I did press calls – there was even a sense of the paparazzi swarming around me! I remain sad to this day that opportunities were lost in making the most of the book – the old challenge of marketing, in that very little took place despite my own best efforts to share ideas regarding opportunities and outlets that I knew would be interested in my story as the punky working-class wheelchair-user making her way to London. I live in hope that a revised paperback may yet get out there.

7. What are you reading right now?

As I mostly access books through audio – I’m moderately visually impaired, and anyway, hard copies of books are too heavy, or thick, for me to hold (apart from slim poetry tomes) – I have a variety on the go simultaneously. Like other writers I’ve read about, I often go for books that are the complete opposite of the genre I’m working in. Therefore, I’m currently reading a lot of non-fiction, mostly history and British folklore, with the occasional short story collection sneaking in. The last novel I read was the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey – an enjoyable elegiac study that’s full of beauty and philosophy, with a bit of sci-fi. All up my alley, but actually, dare I say it, not much of a story.

8. Are you a bookmarker or page-folder?

Ha ha – a funny question for someone who doesn’t read that much in the ‘real world’! However, when I do pick up a hard copy, such as one of my Faber poetry anthologies, I usually fall back on a postcard bought during a visit to a museum. The current one is Blue Cat by Louis Wain.

Share

is an award-winning author and poet who works tirelessly to explore and amplify the disability narrative in fiction, through provocation and humour. She has a memoir, First in The World Somewhere (2017) and a poetry collection, Come Home Alive (2018). Her stories feature in Elemental (2024), Hemingway Shorts (2021) and Mslexia; her non-fiction in Byline Times, Wellcome Collection and The Bookseller.

Penny, who is also an RLF beneficiary, wrote about her experiences as a writer to mark International Day of Persons with Disabilities on 3 December, in an article originally published in The Bookseller. Read it here:

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

At the , we know the power of a good book – as, of course, do our writers. So, to celebrate the National Year of Reading, we revisited our Collected: The Podcast audio archive to hear about some of the books that unlocked a writers’ love of reading.

Subscribe now

Maria McCann: Middlemarch by George Eliot

First published in 1871, Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is an ambitious exploration of the intersecting lives of a group of characters in a Midlands town.

Described by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for adult people”, Middlemarch was also the first novel to have a powerful impact on writer Maria McCann, who says:

“Each time I return to Middlemarch l find it has changed; on first reading it was the story of Dorothea, nowadays she has to share my interest with less glamorous characters. It’s partly because I’m ageing, partly because Eliot persistently directs and educates my sympathies.”

Listen here.

Share

Gabriel Gbadamosi: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart (1958), set in pre-colonial Nigeria, was Chinua Achebe’s debut novel. It tells the story of renowned Igbo warrior Okonkwo, who returns from exile to find his village occupied by missionaries and colonial governors.

The first in Achebe’s foundational African Trilogy, Things Fall Apart was a worldwide bestseller that revolutionised literature – and an inspirational read for writer Gabriel Gbadamosi, as he says:

“Chinua Achebe, an Igbo from Nigeria of my father’s generation, wrote Things Fall Apart, with its title by an Irishman and its split focus between a pre-colonial West African people and culture and a British colonial administrator. It was, when I read it, the best thing I had ever read. It told me: if you want to see the dance of a people’s spirit passing on the street, you cannot stand still in one place, you have to change places, you must engage with it as it moves along.”

Listen here.

Share

Bernie McGill: Milkman by Anna Burns

RLF beneficiary Anna Burns’ groundbreaking novel Milkman – which won The Booker Prize in 2018, making Burns the first Northern Irish author to receive the award – is set in a fictionalised version of Belfast during the Troubles, though the language about the conflict and indeed the characters living through it is deliberately vague.

Novelist and short-story writer Bernie McGill grew up in south Derry during the same time period, and reading Milkman resonated strongly with her experiences. She says:

“Anna Burns’s Milkman changed the way I think. I read it in the summer of 2018 when I was at first won over by the light conversational tone, the naming of characters by nickname or by relationship, the protagonist’s love of reading-while-walking, the otherworldliness of the unnamed cityscape she describes. A little way in, I found that I was holding the thread of the narrative the way that you might hold a breath. And the more I read, the more familiar this world began to appear.”

Listen here.

Share

Diana Hendry: The Mersey Sound Anthology by Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten

For poet and children’s writer Diana Hendry, one of the first books to capture her interest was a collection of work by three Liverpudlian poets, as she describes:

“I was living near Liverpool when, in 1967, Penguin Modern Poets published The Mersey Sound, an anthology of poems by Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten.

Of course I knew something about poetry. After all, I’d been sent to elocution lessons to cure me (ironically) of my scouse accent. I could recite John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’ (still loved) by heart. But this poetry, poetry furnished with ordinary people like bus drivers and sad aunts and written in a language that was playful, witty and brand new had an energy that was irresistibly exciting. It was the poetic cousin to The Beatles.”

Listen here.

Share

Tom Connolly: The Catcher In the Rye by JD Salinger

Widely recognised as a classic of the genre, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in The Rye (1951) is a coming-of-age story that remains one of the most-read books in contemporary American literature.

Novelist and screenwriter Tom Connolly is one of those first captured by Salinger’s tale of a disaffected teenager during his own teenage years:

“The Catcher in the Rye was the first book I re-read. It was the first book that I chose to stay between the pages of rather than be outside marauding around the countryside or playing sport. Before The Catcher in the Rye entered my life, I was in the slow lane at school – but then an English teacher I feared but considered cool on account of him having been in the squad for the 1968 Mexico Olympics, walked into our classroom and slapped a silver-cover version of JD Salinger’s novel down in front of each one of us. ‘Read it,’ he said, ‘all lesson, for homework, and the next lesson and next homework, until you’ve finished it.’ And thirty-five minutes later, when the bell went, the change in me had begun.”

Listen here.

Share

Rukhsana Ahmad: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

With its memorable characters and fantastical scenes, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the best-known children’s books in the world. And the books we read in childhood have a particular tendency to stay with us, as playwright Rukhsana Ahmad reminisces:

“I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on my sister’s recommendation and fell in love with it. It was a different kind of story, about an ordinary little girl walking through a dream. The illustration, a tiny doll’s house door that led Alice into a topsy-turvy universe, is still vivid in my memory. It was a world stranger than the strange English world portrayed in my school textbooks.

Alice turned me into an addict: I became an avid reader, always in search of fantasies. Science fiction, adventure, mysteries and later, detective fiction and romances, in both English and Urdu, fed my insatiable thirst.”

Listen here.

Share

Millie Murray: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, the first of seven volumes of autobiography that chart Angelou’s life, was published in 1969. Decades later, it is still an international bestseller, beloved for its unflinching honesty and evocative portrayal of Angelou’s life as a young Black girl in the American South of the 1930s.

For writer Millie Murray, who first read it in London in the 1980s, it is a book that continues to inspire. She says:

“A friend gave me a book by Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. It transformed my life and encouraged me to take the plunge and write. It also changed my perception of who and what I could become. It had never dawned on me that people of colour wrote books – I had never read one up until that point in my life. I can only describe it as a dawn-breaking moment, in which the sun slowly rises and the dark night is peeled back as the light breaks forth.”

Listen here.

Share

Philip Womack: The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was a prolific writer, publishing 26 novels in her lifetime. Seven were shortlisted for and in 1978, one – The Sea, The Sea – won.

But for writer it was an early Murdoch novel, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), that drew him in:

“The first Iris Murdoch novel I ever read, aged about fourteen, was The Flight from the Enchanter. It was like a magnesium flame in the darkness. The bohemian, rackety world she depicted enraptured me; still more, her writing.”

Listen here.

Share

Roopa Farooki: The Lord of The Rings by JRR Tolkien

Another children’s classic that lives on in many readers imaginations is JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. A trilogy set in the fantasy world of Middle-earth, the richly imagined epic was one of a number of books that inspired novelist and doctor Roopa Farooki:

“The first book that swept me away into its world was The Lord of the Rings. I had always been a voracious reader before, but when I came across Tolkien’s trilogy in the library, I couldn’t put it down… The richness of Tolkien’s mythology completely hooked me, and I read as though I was addicted. I resented the time it took me to brush my teeth and get washed and eat my meals, as it was taking me away from the pages.”

Listen here.

Share

Kathleen Jones: the diaries of Katherine Mansfield

Non-fiction writer Kathleen Jones was so inspired by modernist writer and critic Katherine Mansfield she went on to write a biography of her, The Story-Teller. Here, she explains where her fascination began:

“As a young girl in London, determined to escape my rural northern environment, I found a battered copy of Katherine Mansfield’s diaries in a second-hand book bin in the Charing Cross Road. My teenage self connected fiercely with that other teenager who came from New Zealand to London, desperate to be a writer. I found a reflection of my own life and ambition in Mansfield’s, bought a cheap edition of her short stories and read them until the binding fell apart and it had to be held together with an elastic band. Her writing and what she wrote about writing became essential to me. Although long dead, she was a constant mentor.”

Listen here.

Share

Kerry Young: Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968) is the fourth novel by American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. For novelist Kerry Young, it was an introduction to Baldwin’s work, which in turn opened up a whole new world of inspiration. She says:

“At the age of seventeen, I borrowed a book from my sister. It was James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone. I devoured it. I just lay on the sofa and read it non-stop until it was done. That novel changed my life. How? Why? Because for the first time I saw in a book something that connected to some semblance of my own experience. It felt alive and real. It felt meaningful.”

Listen here.

Share

Susan Fletcher: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Many people know The English Patient because of the 1996 film adaptation, but Michael Ondaatje’s novel was a game-changer as soon as it was published in 1992. Another Booker Prize winner, The English Patient explores the wartime experiences of four people in an Italian villa towards the end of World War II. In 2018, it was voted the best Booker Prize winning novel of all time.

For novelist Susan Fletcher, its depiction of the interior lives of its characters is what makes the book stand the test of time:

“Even now – twenty-three years after I first read it – no book that has taken my breath away so frequently or quietly as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I say quietly because this never feels to be a loud book: it is fluid, tender, intensely poetic; its characters are tired and damaged by war . They reminisce. They grieve. It’s a novel of aftermath – about what is left.”

Listen here.

What book do you return to again and again?

From beloved children’s stories to established classics to poetry and memoir, we’d love to hear about the books that have stayed with you.

Let us know your reading recommendations in the comments.

Leave a comment

Writer and illustrator Mark Haddon has written many books for children, including the 2003 bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His latest book, an illustrated memoir about his life both as a child and as a young artist is called Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour. It is out this week, published by Penguin Books.

Subscribe now

1. What book should every writer read?

I think the world would be a better place if more people – writers included – stopped telling other people what they should do.

2. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

Putting the dead (Virginia Woolf, R.S. Thomas, Patrick White…) to one side - my agent Clare Alexander, who has been at my side for nearly twenty five years, and my wife, Sos Eltis, who is my sternest, most reliable critic and best friend.

3. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?

I have a profound allergy to these alternative time-line counterfactuals. They simply don’t compute. We are who are precisely because of what did and didn’t happen to us, because of what was said to us and what wasn't said. Perhaps that's just an upmarket way of saying I don’t do regret. I have more than enough other psychological shortcomings to keep me busy.

4. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

If it wasn't the poet Paul Farley who told me this, he was certainly the person who formulated it best. Nurture that tiny critical voice at the back of your head. It’s all too easy to think you can get away with those lines, those paragraphs, those pages which you secretly know don’t quite work. Be brave. Listen to the voice. Cross them out and make the work better. I remember Paul saying that, early in his career, he used to send poems to literary magazines and the lines he quietly knew were not up to scratch would be illuminated by a sudden terrible light in that half-second between letting go of the envelope and it hitting the bottom of the post box.

5. What was the proudest moment of your writing career?

Those big moments, which doubtless look fabulous from the outside, are paradoxically unsettling and are nearly always followed by an unpleasant bump down to earth afterwards. For me, the proudest moments are those when I pick up something I’ve written – whether it was yesterday or twenty years ago – and get the buzz I get from any good writing and think, “Yes, I got that just right”. It doesn’t happen often.

6. What is your typical writing day like?

I wish I had one. So many of my days feel like wasted time (especially now as I stagger zombie-like through an extended post-Covid fog). To my repeated surprise, however, much of that wasted time often turns out, in retrospect, to have been very useful (many years ago I spent months on end learning how to draw using a mouse with the then-revolutionary Paint program which came bundled with early iterations of Windows; I then used the technique to create the illustrations in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). I only wish I could use that knowledge to drive out the near-constant conviction that I am going nowhere.

7. What are you reading right now?

What in Me is Dark: the Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade, and Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes Remarkable Theorem Explains the World by Tom Chivers.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

Underliner, margin doodler, scribbler...

Share

Mark Haddon’s first book for children, Gilbert's Gobstopper (Corgi), appeared in 1987 and was followed by seventeen further books for children, many of which he illustrated, including his 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Jonathan Cape, David Fickling). It was the first book to be published simultaneously in two imprints – one for children and one for adults – and won seventeen literary prizes, including the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year.

He has also worked on television projects, plays, poetry and short story collections. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation.

You can read more ‘My Writing Life’ interviews on our RLF Substack.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This month’s Collected: The Podcast episode saw Abigail Mann join presenter Ann Morgan to discuss her hotly anticipated new erotic novel Wet Ink – the so-called “tupperware erotica” novel that launched a publishers’ bidding war – written under the pen name .

In her first conversation about Wet Ink, Abigail, who also writers comedy novels and non-fiction, shares her thoughts on the importance of portraying a diversity of experiences in sex scenes, the perils of the productivity mindset, and the reality of combining writing and motherhood.

Abigail will be writing a series of articles for Collected following the process of Wet Ink from proof to publication. Look out for her first update next month, here on The ’s Substack.

Listen:

Share

The RLF’s Collected: The Podcast delves into the vibrant world of contemporary writers. Our presenters talk to guests from a variety of writing backgrounds, offering a deeper and more nuanced perspective on the writing journey, we go beyond the surface often presented in the media.

New episodes are released fortnightly. You can hear them all at podcast.rlf.org.uk, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Leave a comment