My publisher wife looks across at me reading a proof of one of her soon-to-be-released thrillers. 'The setting is great, isn't it?' she says. 'Really good,' I reply. 'Very generous.' Read more
'The one thing I take with me into my writing every single day, is that no one is ever really who you think they are. We're all projections of the person we think we should be' Read more
After a successful career as a talent agent - representing Michael Parkinson, Ulrika Jonsson and Adam Ant - Melanie Cantor became disillusioned with TV. So she took up writing - and refused to give up on her passion.
Not the real Anthony Horowitz, of course. He's exactly where you'd expect him to be-hunkered down at his desk, toiling away at the next novel even as his newest is hitting bookshelves around the world.
Open to unpublished, unagented children’s writers based anywhere in the world.
Entry fee £20
Prize:
First Prize: a publishing contract with Chicken House with an advance of £10,000, plus the offer of representation from literary agent representation by Lydia Silver of Darley Anderson Children's Book Agency.
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
'The biggest mistake you can make as an author is to think while writing "What does the reader wants to hear"? Because unique worlds & characters are built inside an individual mind. And also your readers do not know what they want to read until they read it.'