Writing Samples of Visiting European Authors

Excerpt from the novel Ordinary People   Chapter 1 M&M To celebrate Obama’s election, the Wiley brothers threw a party at their house in Crystal Palace. They lived near the park, where the transmitting tower loomed up towards the heavens like a lesser Eiffel, stern and metallic by day, red and lit up by night,   …Continue Reading

Extract from the novel Total Loss  Translated from the Swedish into English by Kate Lambert   Part 1   I see five dead hares and try to smile. “Urgh, that’s awful. So many.” Xavier doesn’t look proud or happy, although it was him who shot them. In fact his beautiful smile has something distorted about   …Continue Reading

The Book of Perilous Dishes (novel extract)   Ismail Bina was getting ready to climb into a street carriage, for which reason the gates of the Beylik had been opened, and that seemed a good moment to me. If I had at least had a little phial of aqua phosphori, I would have set fire   …Continue Reading

Burning the Grass   A pale autumn sun had risen over the town and the surrounding veld. Easter Saturday was dawning, a time of sorrow and uncertainty. The smoke from burning grass, which had clouded the horizon for the past week, had come closer during the night. Driven by the east wind, it had crept   …Continue Reading

What Do Humans Share? From the local to the global, and back again   Us and them   Since time immemorial human beings have created binaries, devising images of themselves as against those of others. They have embed­ded these images in their myths, stories, songs, proverbs, and other forms of artis­tic expres­sion. It is crucial   …Continue Reading

The Ironing Board   It was time to get rid of it. Maybe if he left it out in the street, some passer-by would come along and pick it up. On his way home some evenings he’d notice a piece of furniture abandoned on the corner and it would be gone by morning. He threw   …Continue Reading

Extract from the novel, They Know Not What They Do   The Other Woman Helsinki, Finland 1994   It was supposed to be temporary: everything would gradually return to normal. According to the pamphlet from the maternity clinic, you couldn’t put an exact time frame on it – which it then, ignoring its own advice,   …Continue Reading

Extract of the novel Lone Star   My dad is the astronaut who returns home at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He sees himself sitting up in a big bed, one minute he’s a child, the next an old man. His face behind the visor of his space helmet says:   …Continue Reading

An Album of Stories     people come, people go […]  when his wife passed away, one of my grandmother’s brothers, Spyris, was left alone and his children arranged for a housekeeper to come from Thailand to look after him; it seems that the two of them got along well, not just well but very   …Continue Reading