It was twilight or dawn, and I was looking at a painting. Or I was looking at my phone, which was showing me an impression of a painting, given the brightness was turned down low so as not to wake the baby. And of...

I was a child of about seven or eight sitting beside my maternal grandmother Denise at the dining room table where we almost never dined, preferring the more relaxed atmosphere of the kitchen for Saturday lunches or...

I just wanted a coffee, but who could help but stop and stare? The rats in the window appeared to be swinging on little wire trapezes. This was a misreading of the window display, of course, or a whimsical trick of...

When I am writing – and I almost always write at home, in my living room – I listen to CDs. Not to vinyl records, which are too active, with the tiresome need to turn over the platter every twenty minutes, and their...

The world exists as long as we believe in it. The image that is visible to our eyes is the one in which we believe. Large numbers of images do not exist due to the lack of believing in them. Sometimes, this lack is...

When I happen to mention to people that I translate contemporary Korean poets, I’m often asked which poets I translate into Korean. Am I to assume that they didn’t hear me right? Perhaps I didn’t speak loud enough? I’ve...

‘Quitting is a disease,’ says Jordan, a 25-year-old ex-marine construction worker when his teammate Dawn has been vomiting for several hours after drinking from a boggy stream. He fears she will take the team’s flare...

Writers, even if writing a retelling of an old fable or myth, immerse themselves in the works of others to emerge with work inextricably linked to what has been read and connected with (or not) but new. I think I was...

I know what could be said about this image – there are movie stars in it, for example, so you could start with that – but I don’t know what I will say. 

I first met Glenn Adamson when he supervised my PhD at the Royal College of Art more than a decade ago. By then he had already written Thinking Through Craft (2007), and would go on to publish widely, including The...