Angela Young

LATEST ARTICLES ( 146 )

• Women Writers, and Children; and Retro Peepers

  

  I’ve never had children and the reason (apart from meeting the man whose children I’d love to have had well beyond my fertile years) is that I was always... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2018 BOOKS

• John Clare, Gardener and Writer; and Bloom & Wild

  

  In this strange spring and early summer of ours, where March’s snow, frost and ice stopped all plant growth and May’s hot days and tropical rainstorms encourage... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2018 BOOKS

• Writers on Writing, and an Exquisitely Beautiful Tea

  

  When our writers’ group met this week one of our number described how the rise of the ‘plotting and typing’ approach to writing was driving her demented. Read more

  Posted on 14 May 2018 BOOKS

• RMS Titanic: on This Day 106 Years Ago … & Samira Addo, Portrait Artist of the...

  

  It’s 106 years ago today that the ‘unsinkable’ passenger liner, RMS Titanic, hit an iceberg and sank in just two hours and forty minutes. Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2018 BOOKS

• Social Media and the Writer; Modigliani and Akhmatova

  

  It’s wise for writers to have a social media presence these days. Publishers don’t exactly insist on it, but they like writers who have significant followings. Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2018 BOOKS

• Teaching Kids to Fall in Love with Science (a Different Kind of Love for...

  

  I was noodling around on the internet wondering what I was going to post about this month when I discovered Arvind Gupta. He won the Padma Shree on 26 January... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2018 BOOKS

• A New Writing Resolution; and a New (to Me) Altruistic Way of Advertising

  

  I’ve made a new writing resolution: I will not allow the confusing complexity, the sheer size and the constantly changing, shifting nature of a novel’s first... Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2018 BOOKS

• Our Christmas Tree: a Work in Progress … and The Connection at St Martin’s

  

  My other half put our Christmas tree together yesterday (it has hundreds of branches, all with different colour codes, all with their own little slots in its... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2017 BOOKS

• Atul Gawande and Being Mortal; and a Remembrance Poppy Badge

  

  Atul Gawande‘s Being Mortal – which I wrote about here in the context of his 2014 Reith Lectures – is extraordinary for its courageous and honest confrontation... Read more

  Posted on 14 November 2017 BOOKS

• Chaos & Creativity; and Beautiful Bookshops

  

  I dislike hate chaos. Very much. Who doesn’t? But it’s an essential state if you want to write fiction. Messiness of the mind is the sine qua non for writers. Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2017 BOOKS

• Rejection is a Rite of Passage for Writers, and the Raw Chocolate Company

  

  One of the things that a writer takes a while truly to believe (it’s taken me a while) is that rejection is part of the process: it’s necessary, inevitable and... Read more

  Posted on 14 September 2017 BOOKS

• A Very Small Trawl Through a Few Less Well-known News Sites

  

  This month – perhaps because it’s the silly season when news tends towards the frivolous because the House of Commons is in recess and us ordinary folk go on... Read more

  Posted on 14 August 2017 BOOKS

• Blurt It Out and Instead of a Card

  

  I’m submitting the manuscript of my third novel to literary agents. It’s a process that requires much patience, a certain amount of luck and, most importantly,... Read more

  Posted on 14 July 2017 BOOKS

• Words on Writing, and Pass on a Poem

  

  There are hundreds of thousands of words written about writing fiction: how to write, why we write, what to do when we can’t write and on and on so that,... Read more

  Posted on 14 June 2017 BOOKS

• Auditioning to Become a WI Speaker, and ‘Born Baffled: Musings on a Writing Life’

  

  In March I auditioned to become a WI speaker. The WI, you say? Don’t they just make jam, sing Jerusalem and talk a lot? Yes to all three, but no to JUST. Read more

  Posted on 14 May 2017 BOOKS

• Spring in London, and The Kid Stays in the Picture

  

  Spring in London is an astonishing thing: blossom among the grey buildings and pavements; green and blue and pink and white making us look up at it and then at... Read more

  Posted on 14 April 2017 BOOKS

• A History of Britain in 21 Women, by Jenni Murray

  

  This is both the thing I’m writing about this month and the thing I’d love to have written, in a parallel universe where time is infinite and all things are... Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2017 BOOKS

• Anselm Kiefer and Heywood Hill

  

  On the weekend we went to the Anselm Kiefer Exhibition at the White Cube in Bermondsey. It’s just closed, but if there’s any of his work anywhere near you do... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2017 BOOKS

• John Berger, Ways of Seeing … and PEN International

  

  John Berger, who died aged 90 on January 2nd, was a critic, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and poet and well-known to many. Read more

  Posted on 14 January 2017 BOOKS

• Dare Always Dare, and Guerilla Grafters

  

  A friend pointed out to me a week or so ago that this: DARE ALWAYS DARE is written in neon above the foyer entrance to the Old Vic Theatre (no idea why I’d neve... Read more

  Posted on 14 December 2016 BOOKS