As children, our minds are filled with magic. With all of the information we absorb at a young age, there is no wonder that being a children's author can be very rewarding. Speaking of rewards, a children's author can start off small but eventually make a serious living! Adults that once read...

When our writing resists us - when it refuses to do as we hope - we often respond with ever more force, pushing it to bend to our will. We ask a friend to tell us which "darlings" to murder. We go through with a red pencil, slashing words.

My grandmother read one novel in her life. She told me that fact on more than one occasion and I rather suspect that she enjoyed shocking me with it. Imagine: one single book in 88 years! The much-honored volume was Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, consumed in the wake of Richard...

For a while we were told that books were going to be a thing of the past. A new century had dawned, our lives were being digitised and surely there was no longer any reason to lug the pressed pulp of dead trees around. And yet, over the past decade, it seems clear that the death of the book has...

• Do genre writers receive adequate respect from the literary establishment? ‘Everything's upside down. They assume that to do something that appeals to a huge audience is somehow easier than to do something that appeals to a tiny audience. Because we do a book a year people think you just...

On a cool winter's day in Cairo, I stepped into the Marriott Hotel and wandered over to the local bakery tucked away near the lavish hotel gardens. In the far corner of the small room sat Umm Kulthoum Mahfouz. We were meeting to discuss her recollections of her father, the late Naguib Mahfouz,...