On Tuesday, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less: A Novel was announced as the 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction, causing some surprise in literary circles. Less: A Novel is a humorous light-hearted story in which its protagonist Arthur Less embarks upon a desperate around-the-world trip to avoid attending a former boyfriend’s wedding and, on the surface, […]
In 1978, Murakami was watching a baseball game when American player Dave Hilton came to bat. At the exact moment that Hilton hit a double, Murakami realised that he could write a novel. He began writing Hear the Wind Sing that same night. Before that game, Murakami has said, he was just ‘one of those […]
What makes love in literature compelling? Too often, fiction focuses on romantic relationships that are difficult, tragic, unrequited or even obsessive. The types of relationships that fit these categories can seem uniform: romantic, intimate, and commonly featuring an end goal of marriage. The love that characters might feel for family or friends, on the other […]
25 January has long since marked the day when the life and works of Scottish poet Robert Burns is celebrated. Whilst Keara Murphy’s ‘The Bard and I’ participated in this tradition, it also used less frequently discussed aspects of his work to present them in a new light. Murphy, a playwright and comedian, debuted her play […]