Live

The queues at Tate Modern stretched around the block yesterday. Everyone wanted to see Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work – Australia’s first major European showcase of an artist who started painting at seventy. I stood before “Ntang Dreaming” and felt something shift. These weren’t just dots and lines. This was language I couldn’t read but somehow […]

Christmas morning in London felt quieter than expected. No snow, just that particular December stillness when most of the city stays indoors. I’d planned nothing elaborate. Coffee, reading, maybe a walk if the weather cooperated. The past months have been dense with festivals, conferences, teaching commitments. Sometimes the best gift is structured emptiness. Spent the

The Marylebone branch always feels different in December. The Christmas displays are obvious, but the light falls differently through those tall windows when London gets properly winter. I wasn’t hunting for anything specific. Walking between shelves without agenda lets your brain process recent months without forcing conclusions. 2025 has been intense. ECG festivals, Literature Across

Yesterday morning, whilst waiting for my flat white at Monmouth Coffee on Monmouth Street, I opened Goodreads to mark a book as finished. The app immediately suggested The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis. I stared at the recommendation for longer than seemed reasonable for someone standing in a coffee queue. I’d been thinking about Ellis for weeks

Spent yesterday afternoon at Waterstones Tottenham Court Road, ostensibly browsing the science fiction section but actually solving a structural problem with Project Mirror. My protagonist has been too sympathetic. She fixes people’s aesthetic glitches with genuine belief that she’s helping, and readers need to understand why that conviction matters. But I’ve been missing the antagonist,

Yesterday I spent three hours wandering the six floors of Foyles on Charing Cross Road, and came away with exactly the kind of intellectual stimulation I didn’t know I needed. There’s something about being surrounded by 200,000 books that makes your own writing feel simultaneously insignificant and urgent. Standing in that spacious atrium with natural

Flying back from Antalya, I realised how identical beauty performance has become across cities. The same Instagram pose at the Mediterranean that I see on the Thames. The same filtered selfie technique at Turkish beach resorts that appears in Hyde Park. The same eyebrow shape, the same subtle lip enhancement, the same head tilt optimised

Visited Iris Colomb’s exhibition at the National Poetry Library today. Her approach to poetry as multimedia experience feels completely fresh. The ‘Try destruction!’ installation caught my attention immediately. A carefully constructed pyramid of crumpled paper balls where Colomb had systematically fragmented existing texts, transforming written words into sculptural form. The methodical destruction becomes an act

Yesterday’s visit to Yoshitomo Nara’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery left me contemplating the intersection of childhood consciousness and artistic resistance—themes surprisingly relevant to contemporary storytelling. Nara’s wide-eyed, large-headed figures possess an unsettling directness that reminded me of writing character psychology. These aren’t cute children; they’re complex beings carrying both vulnerability and defiance. Standing before