By Ben Brooker One of our recent Writers in Residence, Ben Brooker, discusses his residency. In the first two decades of the 20th century, James Joyce used one of the upstairs rooms at the now legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop on Paris’s Left Bank as his personal office. There, he wrote Ulysses, universally regarded as […]

By Alan Baxter You’ve heard the old adage, I’m sure. Write what you know. That’s all very well, but it’s actually a terrible piece of advice. After all, we all know some stuff, but not much in the grand scheme of things. And if we only write what we know, we’ll soon run out of […]

By Jane Turner-Goldsmith In the late 80s, psychologist James Pennebaker posed the question: ‘why do people throughout the world seek to tell their stories?’ In his original study, participants were asked to reflect on their deepest thoughts and feelings about a traumatic event. They then had to write for 15 to 20 minutes per day, […]