Born in England, I’ve been living in central Italy since 1980. My début novel – LITTLE MONSTERS – was published by Picador on 7 March 2008. The paperback came out on 6 February 2009. A collection of short fiction, entitled THE SCENT OF CINNAMON AND OTHER STORIES, is now available from Salt Publishing. The title story was selected as one of the O. Henry Prize Stories 2007. My second novel, ANY HUMAN FACE, was published by Picador on 7 May 2010. Take a look around this site for anything else you’d like to know.
(Photo credit: Patrizia Casamirra)
I have recently finished Little Monsters, and wanted to say how much I enjoyed it – a very subtle story that penetrates under the skin and leaves one thinking about it days later.
You and I knew one another slightly years ago, when I was Belle Anscombe and we had Stephen Heath in common! I’ve written a lot of TV drama (mainly crime), but have a novel out this summer (Out of Sight; Quercus) which deals with very similar ideas to Little Monsters – how to escape past damage, how not to go on repeating destructive behaviour. As I think with you in Little Monsters, I am far more intrigued by the legacy of, the ripples from, some big event (your father killing your mother) than by the event itself. I very much look forward now to reading Any Human Face.
What a lovely surprise, and haven’t you done well! It’s an ambition of mine, almost certain never to be fulfilled, to write an episode of Coronation Street, but I’d have been happy to contribute to The Bill, alas no more… I hope you enjoy Any Human Face as much as you did LM. And I’m also looking forward to reading Out of Sight. Do keep in touch!
Oh, Coronation Street, yes! When it’s good, the writing has been absolutely magic. And part of what keeps Little Monsters lingering so powerfully in the mind is its filmic images …
So I’m not the only one to think Little Monsters has the stuff of cinema…
I’d be thinking Lynne Ramsay, that style of director …
One of the disadvantages of living in a small Italian town with only one cinema is that you lose touch with what’s going on, so I’d never heard of Lynne Ramsay before this morning! But I’ve done a little research and, yes, she’s just the person I’m looking for…
To Charles Lambert on “One of the disadvantages of living in a small Italian town with only one cinema is that you lose touch with what’s going on”:
And your language? Aren’t you afraid it will start to pick up some Italian ways? You wouldn’t even notice, but your friends at home might.
I am Swiss, and I have more or less lost my native dialect here (in Spain), and that is not such a great loss, because it exists only as sound, has not much of a past and no literature. But when Americans here or English people or those from Ireland, all of them working as teachers, — when you hear all those “jo!” in a bar for instance, unofficial talk, you wonder whether they could still do without the Spanish ingredients.
It’s something you have to be aware of. Some people seem to lose it more than others – a lot of English people in Italy start to put an interrogative ‘no?’ on the ends of their sentences, which drives me bonkers. And then there are the little words that are more economical than their English equivalents, or that have no real equivalent, not to speak of words that describe a specifically Italian experience and don’t translate at all. The real risk may be that the register of your spoken English starts to get a bit Latinised, but I am aware of the risk, and I do what I can to stop this happening!