Category: London
Ten Years!
In the fall of 2011, our small family moved to London, England for a few years. There I set up office in a small dark room in a beautiful flat […]
Bourne End
Canadian Writers Abroad is now based in Jerusalem, but as always, the world is our home. I say “we” because over the past couple of years Canadian Writers Abroad has […]
June
The summer solstice poem comes, surprisingly to those familiar with her fiction and prose, from Isabel Huggan, who has been writing poetry over the past few years. Together with two […]
Falling for the Love of Books
“Let me tell you what it’s like to be edited by Doug Gibson. If he’d edited Shakespeare, there’d be no Shakespeare, it’d all be on the floor.” On the […]
Not Getting Married
Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age by Mandy Treagus (University of Adelaide Press 2014) is an academic study of three novels: Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African […]
From Jig Street to London
I am neither exile nor émigré . I just happen to be in this place, and any interpretation I might put on it now is a combination of dubious […]
Imagine
At the Remembrance Day ceremony for Canada in Green Park, London, the High Commissioner, Gordon Campbell, asked everyone to imagine what it would have been like to be in the […]
National Poetry Day
Here in the UK it is National Poetry Day. What does that mean? First, the Forward Arts Foundation, the charity that co-ordinates the day’s events, defines it on their website: […]
The Writers’ Friend
Something I didn’t cover much in “Pay the Rent” was the role of the media, particularly the CBC, in writers’ lives – not just as an income supplement via journalism […]
London Short Story
I was sitting at a table in the Waterstones Piccadilly lower cafe, sipping my water and watching people trickle in to the opening of the London Short Story Festival (18-21 […]
Ann-Marie
Actor and author Ann-Marie MacDonald was in London this week to promote her novel, just released here in England by Sceptre (out in September 2014 in Canada): Adult Onset. Briefly, […]
Adult Onset
Ann-Marie MacDonald‘s latest novel, Adult Onset, published in September 2014 in Canada, was launched this week in the UK by her publisher here, Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton. […]
English Winter
Wednesday noon the weather in London today is 5 degrees celcius and 83% humidity with a chance of rain at 10%, cloudy skies. According to the Met office, the weather […]
Rich Wives
In the National Portrait Gallery, in the room called Expansion and Empire, there is a small display: “Old Titles and New Money: American Heiresses and the British Aristocracy,” showing until […]
Colonial Moderns
Review of Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 by Anna Snaith, Cambridge University Press 2014, 278 pp hardcover (ISBN: 9780521515450). Reviewed by Debra Martens. Modernism is loosely defined […]
Emily in England
Emily Carr was both artist and writer. Something I didn’t know: she took a writing course at Victoria College in the summer of 1934.* Bed-ridden by illness, she wrote towards […]
Book Sitting
One weekend morning in July we took the Bloomsbury Trail to look at benches that had been created in honour of books, a joint project of the National Literacy Trust […]
Fun at Foyles
There was a bookstore on Charing Cross Road in which you could get lost. Because the space was two buildings joined together, the books were to be discovered in cubbies […]
Are Writers Unfun?
It’s Canada Day, and I am thinking about that poet at the Vancouver Olympics: Shane Koyczan, spoken word performer. I think that was brilliant, figuring out a way to put a […]
Talent… Hustle
On April 28, I met Charlie Foran at his new office in Toronto, to talk about his book, Planet Lolita, and about his biography of Mordecai Richler — Mordecai:The Life […]
Mordecai Richler
Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) left Canada on the Franconia in September 1950 for reasons both cultural and personal. In Charles Foran’s biography of Richler, Mordecai: the Life and Times, Foran suggests […]
41 Commonwealth
41 of 53 Commonwealth countries criminalize homosexuality. This statistic led Commonwealth Writers, an initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation, to organize an event to open discussion on this issue: panellists included […]
West London Air Terminal
Isabel Huggan’s piece (Footloose) about living in London in 1966 and travelling around the Continent mentioned the West London Air Terminal.
Isabel Huggan London 1966
During a visit to London in 2013, Isabel Huggan mentioned having had diesel flavoured coffee at the West London Air Terminal. CWA asked if she would write about that time, and she has.
Chava Rosenfarb
Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) is a Canadian writer you should know about. An award-winning poet and novelist, she wrote in Yiddish. While living in Montreal, she began translating her own work […]
There and Not Back
Is it worth it? After two years of putting out Canadian Writers Abroad (CWA), that’s a question I have to ask myself. The other question is: should I continue? CWA […]
Allons-y!
Geronimo! Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary fell on the same day as the second anniversary of Canadian Writers Abroad. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read what I, and […]
Land of the Lumberjack
A quick search of UK media to try to get a little fact — how many people turned up at the Canada Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square — was frustrating. […]
Writers by the Dozen: Peter Wilkins’ Portraits
Last night I was at Canada House to hear Angela Hewitt and Gerald Finley perform in an enchanted evening (that was the closing song). If you have never been to […]
Canadian Buzz at the London Book Fair 2013
There were over 20 Canadian publishers at the London Book Fair this year, as well as some agents. I asked a few of them if it was worth their while, […]
Kate Pullinger
She found London was a place she could sink deep into, sink everything, and yet not drown. -from The Last Time I Saw Jane Best known in Canada for winning […]
Jane Austen and…
January 28, 2013, was the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. There was a readathon in Bath on the day, and by Jane Austen societies […]
Place and the Blues
“My lifelong involvement with Mrs. Dempster began at 5:58 o’clock p.m. on the 27th of December, 1908, at which time I was ten year and seven months old. I am […]
Respirer et écrire
I have been thinking about Sara Jeanette Duncan lately. I should be thinking about her work, but I’ve been thinking about her. OK, when I cough (a lingering cold), I […]
The Future Margaret Laurence Wanted
Are you disappointed by the results of Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development? Here are some uplifting words from a wise woman who once lived in Knightsbridge, not far […]
Love Literary London
There are many things to love about London, but my favourite is its celebration of literature. Besides theatre, Sherlock and Doctor Who. Dead authors appear on blue plaques on walls […]
T.C. Haliburton and the Olympics
The London Chapter of the Haliburton Society is joining the Olympics, in the same way that the Cultural Olympiad is running in parallel with the London 2012 Olympic Games. It’s […]
Jubilee and Dialect
In my last post I tried to start a discussion on the use of dialect and idiom in fiction. I expected people to exclaim Faulkner! and James Joyce! in the […]
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