Author Almanac
Writers are often treated as monuments. The Almanac remembers that they were people. Each entry begins with a date, anecdote, or overlooked detail and uses it as a way into a life, a work, or a larger conversation about reading, writing, and what survives.
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28.10 Ted Hughes
How did I get here? How can this happen? Who’s in charge of this mess? Ted Hughes’s Bayonet Charge joins the chorus of writers looking for answers.
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27.10 Sylvia Plath
Does the artist get to choose whether to silence the cry within them, or give it form? Are they creator, or conduit?
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21.10 Ursula K Le Guin
You can read Le Guin’s classic short story in a single sitting. But the moral questions it raises might stay with you forever.
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19.10 Jonathan Swift
Until I read ‘A Modest Proposal’, I hadn’t properly understood that writing like this was possible. Now, I like to encourage it in my students.
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07.10 Edgar Allen Poe
It’s the best short story I’ve ever read, but how can I sell it to you without becoming a ‘tell-tale’ myself?
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06.10 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lord Tennyson’s wake? Come and share a dram with Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, James Clavell, and the cast of Star Trek – Captain Kirk will at least be there
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21.09 Stephen King
Some writers can make you laugh. Or cry. They can make you feel sick. Or terrify you. They can make you keep going when you feel you can’t. Only one has done ALL of these things to me.
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15.09 Agatha Christie
When I stop and think about it, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are possibly more frightening than the criminals they expose.
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09.09 Leo Tolstoy
We don’t earn our faces. We don’t choose our symmetry, our hair, our height, our bone structure. Yet somehow we can end up treating the result as though it tells us something about character.
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08.09 Siegfried Sassoon
Sassoon’s anger is contemptuous, whereas Owen’s more often feels bewildered. It gives Sassoon more satirical ‘bite’.