When I was young my parents played the Oúija board and had to get a vicar to get rid of unwanted presences. Growing up with accounts of poltergeist hauntings meant ...
J.K. Rowling wrote in a café, Virginia Woolf had a standing desk, Roald Dahl an unheated shed. None of these were ‘ideal’, but products of necessity. I am lucky in ...
by Crystal Abidin Crystal Abidin is a digital anthropologist who has studied internet celebrity cultures since 2008. Here are 5 common misconceptions about internet celebrities that you can learn about ...
I started reading mysteries when I was very young. I loved Richard Scarry’s picture books featuring the detectives Sam Cat and Dudley Pig! I started writing them quite early on ...
We all know that the rapid pace of technology is changing the world as we know it. But what about the long-term impact of ‘disruptive technologies’ on society? Here, Female ...
The soundtrack to my writing is generally silence, interspersed with meows from the cat demanding attention while she walks across my keyboard inventing strange new words. I know some writers ...
On the publication of his new book, My Job Isn’t Working!, careers coach Michael Brown shares his top tips on how to achieve job satisfaction. Over the last 20 years ...
Now You See Her is the story that evolves when four-year-old Alice disappears suddenly at a busy school fete. Alice is in the care of her mother’s best friend, Charlotte, ...
So, you’re older now. What’s up with body image? A few more wrinkles, body parts going south? I overheard a man tell his wife to cover up her cleavage. He ...
My second novel, The Hope Fault, celebrates the families we’re born into, and the families we make (and break and re-make). Full of steps and exes and aunties, missing parents ...
Think The Hunger Games. Think Dune, or The Power, or Star Wars. Even The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. (Yes, really: its entire plot is the struggle to end ...
The island can be a paradise, but it can also be a place of danger and isolation. It can be a place where normal codes of behaviour become warped, where ...
There’s nothing quite like climbing several thousand feet in a Spitfire, with the earth whizzing below, and the infinite sky ahead. These days if you fancy a ride on a ...
My desk faces the garden, and occasionally the squirrels that live nearby will try and distract me (they’ve even played with my son’s football). I’m too easily distracted though, so ...
I quit being a human rights barrister to be a writer. Financially that was a foolish decision, but I was driven to start writing a novel after working on an ...
It was something which my nan said, shortly before she died a couple of years ago, which made me think about the secrets people take to their graves. Particularly women, ...
Pick a fear and conquer it! We all have something that scares us but conquring a fear is the best feeling! Everyone has something that scares them but the feeling ...
My older sister and I were born in Leicester, England and my family lived in Birmingham for two and a half years, where both my younger brothers were born. I ...
It’s official, crime fiction is the most popular genre in the UK, outselling every other category of fiction in 2017 according to Nielsen Bookscan data. We cannot, it seems, get ...
At the beginning of 2015, three London schoolgirls travelled to Syria to join Islamic State. The oldest was only sixteen, and all three were described in the hundreds of newspaper ...
After more years than I care to remember working shifts as a front line police officer, since retirement, my days now have a relatively leisurely start; as long as Bailey, ...
The first rule in managing a long-distance friendship? Do not communicate before the person in the earlier time zone has been properly caffeinated! That is one of the many lessons ...
