Author Archive: Judith Kinghorn
A Sense of Place
“By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, […]
The Artistic Coma and The Arrogant Intellect
I’m a writer and a reader. I love all kinds of books. But I’m instinctively repelled by arm-achingly thick, academic-looking tomes that claim to be about the craft of writing. Those ones that include pie charts and Venn diagrams. I prefer to read words about words, am an admirer of the slender and concise, and […]
Neglected Lady Novelists And Me
It was the 1980s and I was a student in London when I began to discover women writers who, despite belonging to my grandmothers’ – or even my great-grandmothers’ – generation, had voices so compelling and authentic I couldn’t stop reading them. They included Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Comyns, Rebecca West, Stevie […]
Historical Fiction: Making Research Invisible – And Ignoring The Aspidistra
Memory is a cruel thing. It lingers in dark trenches, whispering, or withholding, waiting to creep into the no-man’s-land of our dreams. It knows what we long to remember, and what we hope to forget. And it knows Hearsay and Imagination will cover any gaps… So begins my new novel, The Echo of Twilight. Set […]
But Who will Want to Read it?
An esteemed British writer, one whose novels have been published for half a century, advised me recently not to read my own book reviews – unless they’re written by someone whose opinion you respect. Good reviews will make you vain, they told me, and the bad ones will crush you. Since then, I’ve tried to […]
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