The Sigla Blog

* William Trevor turned 80 over the weekend. BBC7’s I Am A Storyteller celebrated the writer - you can listen back on the BBC iPlayer.
* Having gushed about John Crace’s Digested Read, I was pleasantly surprised to open Saturday’s Guardian Review and spot what appears to be a new section by Crace - Digested Classics. […]

Yesterday, my friend Paul sent me a link to this post by Andrew Sullivan entitled “Is Blogging Harder Than Writing A Book?”.
Sullivan compares the two media:

“I’d say they’re just very different genres and each can be hard in their own way. I have to say that producing a book - I have four […]

Over a lukewarm takeaway tea in a gallery this morning, I had a really interesting chat with Anne Enright, who was gracious and charming about the forthcoming Booker Prize. At least she didn’t mind me alluding to it, unlike my innocent-remark-bites-you-on-the-ass Beryl Bainbridge encounter.
Anyway, no better reason than to post the following.
* Read […]

Today is the birthday of Graham Greene and, according to the Writer’s Almanac entry for October 2nd, Greene had a simple, devastatingly routine way of working. Writing for a precise window of time every day seems to have been helped him clock up an impressive word count, and ultimately write as many books as he […]

The new issue of the excellent Dublin Review of Books is online. Unlike many similar publications, it’s completely free and you read the entire articles. Of particular interest this month are reviews of Michael Foot: A Life and A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill about the love triangle between […]

Is imitation really the sincerest form of flattery? Or is it just the laziest common denominator? If I find something on a blog I like, I quote and/or link to it. If someone spots an idea or post here that inspires them to put their own spin on things, that’s fine as long as […]

Every year when the contenders for the
Orange Prize are announced, you can usually set your watch by a handful of grumbling columnists who come out of the woodwork to say that a women-only fiction prize is a bad idea. No one of course, seems bothered to tackle the other inherent problems in book prizes. If […]

*You’ve probably seen the above ad as part of Trócaire’s Lenten Campaign for International Women’s Day about gender inequality. If you haven’t, no doubt you’ve heard about the row with the BCI who have banned the ad because it was deemed to have a “political end”. Red Mum discusses the controversy and Hugh also […]

* Q: “What advice would you give to new writers?
A: “I don’t think you should ever try to make things up. We all lead such strange lives that there is no need to. Use your own experiences and then twist it a bit. You should read what you have written out loud. I write […]

For Christmas, my older brother bought me Jon Ronson’s book Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness. I like Ronson’s column in The Guardian, but figured that a whole book of his narcissistic whining would be a bit too much. Like Woody Allen though, he injects the right amount of humour and isn’t […]

Happy 07 to everyone and hopefully Christmas was restful and fun or insane and forgettable, depending on what you were after.
I’m lazily trying to get back into a routine (I’ve watched far too many old films and have not yet been to the sales) so it’s digest posting of a few bits and pieces for […]

If you do one thing…
Tonight: Go and see Juana Molina in Crawdaddy tonight. Her album Son is one of my favourites of the year (it made my mid-year ‘Best of’ list. The best way to sum it up is “like imagining Astrid ‘Girl From Ipanema’ Gilberto tinkering about with keyboards and samplers” and you can […]