News
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Write About What You Don’t Know
Here’s a wonderful myth, one you’ll hear retold from writing class to university up and down the land: ‘Write about what you know.’ I almost fall off my chair laughing typing those words. Shakespeare never set foot in Denmark but he wrote Hamlet. He almost certainly never visited Italy, yet he wrote Othello, The Merchant…
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Venice Noir launches at Harrogate
Just back from a surprisingly warm and sunny Theakstons Crimewriting festival at Harrogate where we launched the international edition of Venice Noir 2026. Here are some of my co-conspirators after the event — Suzy Lishman, our resident super pathologist who has a fantastic panel on her hands this year; Philip Gwynne Jones, Erin Kelly, historian…
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The Pervasive Myth of Writer’s Block
You never walk into a supermarket and hear the person on the till say, ‘Sorry, I can’t serve you today. I’ve got checkout person’s block.’ Yet every day, every minute it seems, someone somewhere in the world dashes their hands to head and shrieks that the muse has mysteriously departed them. On social media naturally.…
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Countdown to Venice Noir… Harrogate here we come
We’ve been working on the international line-up for Venice Noir 2026 for months… and I’m delighted to tell you now it’s done. Unfortunately I’m not going to tell you what we have in store. Only that it’s even bigger and better than last year, now running across four days, and we’ve added La Fenice opera…