Top 100 Creative Writing Blogs

From poetry to lengthy prose, creative writing can be a great way to express yourself. Of course, even the best students and writers can use a few tips, a little inspiration and a whole lot of help getting their work out there. These blogs offer all of that and more. From blogs that focus on writers still trying to make it in the publishing world to those providing updates from best selling authors, you’ll find all kinds of information geared towards improving and informing your creative writing.

General

These blogs cover a wide range of issues for students of the written word.

1. Writer Unboxed: Learn both about the creative and business sides of fiction writing from this great blog.
2. Backstory: Ever wonder where writers get their inspiration? You’ll find loads of posts that record just that and you can contribute your own stories as well.
3. Write Anything: Check out this multi-author blog to find writing challenges, inspiration and shared writing.
4. Inkygirl: Daily Diversions for Writers: This blogger not only posts about using the Internet to improve your writing but posts her own comics frequently as well.
5. Women on Writing: Get information on writing geared just towards female writers out there.
6. Cute Writing: Here you’ll find posts on writing, blogging and publishing and many articles focus on ways to make your work more efficient.
7. Write to Done: If you enjoy the blog Zen Habits, you’ll appreciate this blog by the same author. This site focuses on simple, effective ways to write more, better.
8. The Urban Muse: Freelance writer Susan Johnston provides tips and tidbits for other working writers out there.
9. Writing Forward: From grammar tips to ideas for improving your creative writing, check out the helpful posts on this site.
10. Writer’s Write: This blog is a great place to find information about writers, books and the publishing world.
11. Creative Writing Corner: Connect with your creative side through the posts on this blog.
12. Creative Writing Contests: Want to challenge your creative skills? This blog can direct you to the great number of writing competitions out there.

Aspiring Authors

These bloggers are writing on the ‘net and off, still waiting to get their best work published.

13. The Desperate Writer: This writer and cosmetologist shares her stories on this blog, both personal and creative.
14. Incurable Disease of Writing: Blogger Missy is getting her degree in creative writing and posts about her experiences on this site.
15. Emerging Writers Network: If you’re just getting started in your writing career, check out this site to learn about the ins and outs of writing and about other writers working towards success.
16. Ficticity: Check out this site to find posted stories, writing tips and even a few book reviews.
17. Authors’ Blogs: This isn’t just one blog, but a collection of numerous aspiring writers sites, so you can take your pick of reading material.
18. Plot Monkeys: These four bloggers talk about everything from their everyday lives to the books they love.
19. Maternal Spark: Moms who love to write or create on the side

Published Authors

Get some advice, inspiration and motivation from these authors doing what they love and getting paid for it.

20. The Orwell Diaries: Most writers are familiar with the work of George Orwell. Here you’ll find regular postings from his personal diaries.
21. Tom Conoby’s Writing Blog: This blogger shares his thoughts on books he reads, his own writing and much more.
22. John Baker’s Blog: This working writer shares his passions– reading and writing– on this site.
23. The Man In Black: Young mystery writer Jason Pinter shares his thoughts on just about everything on this blog.
24. Neil Gaiman’s Journal: This well-known writer has published a large number of books, several of which have been made into major motion pictures. Check out his blog for more about what he’s working on right now.
25. Wil Wheaton in Exile: Readers of this blog might recognize his name from his days on Star Trek: The Next Generation but these days this actor spends more of this time writing books and posting on his blog.
26. A Writer’s Life: Love the TV series Monk? Learn more about the writer behind the books the series is based on from this blog.
27. The Paperback Writer: With several published books under her belt, this blogger shares her writing tips as well as information about her personal life.
28. Pocket Full of Words: Novelist Holly Lisle shares her experiences as a writer on her blog.
29. Beyond the Beyond: Bruce Sterling has written numerous science fiction novels and now shares his thoughts on science and technology on his WIRED blog.
30. Contrary Brin: Scientist and author David Brin maintains this site where readers can talk about issues from his books or just about anything else.
31. Scott Berkun: This author teaches creative thinking, writes books and give public talks. Read about his writing adventures and otherwise here.

Improving Your Craft

Get some tips on becoming a better writer from these blogs.

32. Becoming a Writer Seriously: Aspiring writers can find all kinds of helpful advice and guidance on this blog.
33. WordSwimmer: Learn to understand the writing process a little better with a little help from blogger Bruce Black. There are loads of interviews with authors as well as suggestions on improving your writing.
34. Time to Write: Blogger Jurgen Wolff wants to strike a creative spark in writers of all kinds by providing tips and inspiration here.
35. Flogging the Quill: Check out this blog to learn more about the craft of creative storytelling.
36. Six Sentences: What can you write in six sentences? Share your attempt at this writing exercise on this blog.
37. Luc Reid: From tips on finding time to practice writing to information about the publishing industry, you’ll find loads of helpful posts on this blog.
38. The Writing Show: While more podcast than true blog, this site is a good place for writers to get answers to their questions and get help finding inspiration.
39. Men With Pens: Whether you’re a writer freelancing or just writing for fun, you’ll find tips on how to do it better on this blog.
40. Write a Better Novel: Make sure whatever you’re writing will get the attention it deserves when time comes to get it published. This blog provides all kinds of information on creating a better novel, no matter the subject.
41. Write Better: Here you’ll find a wide range of writing tips to get your creative writing in top shape.
42. Clear Writing with Mr. Clarity: Learn to get to the point and write clearly and concisely whether you’re writing a letter at work or working on a book.
43. Mike’s Writing Workshop: This blogger is all about posting things that can help writers get better and get inspired.
44. Kim’s Craft Blog: Learn about writing fiction, memoirs and other creative writing from this writer who teaches courses at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Grammar and Editing

You may have the best ideas but that doesn’t mean much if you can’t write them well. These blogs will help you tune up your writing so it’s publish-worthy.

45. GrammarBlog: Laugh at the grammar and spelling errors of others while getting tips on improving your own skills on this blog.
46. Evil Editor: This editor might be evil, but the tips provided on this blog can really help you refine your stories.
47. Blue Pencil Editing: This blog is both a good resource for working editors and and writers in search of a little guidance.
48. Editing and Proofreading Hints and Tips: Get simple tips on improving your editing process from this blog.
49. Headsup: the blog: Here you’ll find posts about the sometimes frustrating world of editing and learn what not to do.
50. Grammarphobia: This site offers readers the chance to ask their own grammar and language questions and get answers.
51. Apostrophe Abuse: Think you know how to use the apostrophe? This blog might teach you otherwise.
52. Daily Writing Tips: Get some daily advice on how to improve the basics of your writing.
53. ProWriting Tips: This blog is home to numerous grammar and writing tips.
54. The Engine Room: JD, a copy editor, runs this blog all about language use that can help you get a handle on your usage.
55. Cheryl Norman, Grammar Cop: If you’ve got some questions about grammar that need answering, visit this blog.
56. English4Today: Get a handle on the English language through the guidance of blogger Anthony Hughes.

Getting Published

The ultimate goal for many students and professionals working on creative writing is to get work published. This blogs can help you learn about the business, get your work out there, or even publish it yourself.

57. Ask Allison: Ask your questions about breaking publishing and gets answers from this helpful blogger.
58. Guide to Literary Agents: Get some tips on where and how to find a literary agent to represent your work when the time comes.
59. Beacon Literary Services: Emerging writers and those with a little experience under their belts alike can take advantage of the publishing advice offered here.
60. Questions and Quandaries: This Writers Digest blog answers a wide variety of questions about publishing.
61. Writer Beware Blogs: While you may be desperate to get your work out there make sure you protect yourself from scams. The information in this blog can help you stay safe.
62. The Swivet: Colleen Lindsay is a literary agent and you can read her reactions to recent publications and if you meet her requirements even submit your own work.
63. The Rejecter: This blogger isn’t a literary agent but an assistant to one, the person you’ll have to go through to get your work published, and she posts all about her work on this blog.
64. Booksquare: This blog works to dissect the publishing industry so you can learn it inside and out.
65. Pubrants: Literary agent Kristen blogs about everything publishing from queries to working with writers.
66. Nathan Bransford Literary Agent: Want to know more about literary agents and the publishing world? Check out this blog.
67. Practicing Writing: This blog posts plenty on writing advice as well as the latest publishing opportunities.
68. Bob Baker’s Full-Time Author Blog: Thinking of making the leap to being a full-time writer? This blog can be a great resource on publishing your own book to set the stage.
69. Future Perfect Publishing: Explore all the possibilities for publishing that are out there through the help of this blog by Tom Masters.

Genre Focused

These creative writing blogs focus on one particular type of writing, such as mysteries, romance and fantasy.

70. Storytellers Unplugged: This multi-author blog is contributed to by writers, editors and publishers and can give you a great background on writing in a wide range of genres.
71. Gibberish: Science fiction and fantasy writer Jayme Lynn Blaschke posts about his writing and more on this site.
72. SF Signal: From books to movies, you can keep abreast of all the goings on in world of science fiction through this blog.
73. SF and Fantasy Novelists: Here you’ll find loads of information on writers working in the science fiction genre.
74. Reading, Raving and Ranting: If you’re interested in historical fiction you can read about Susan Higginbotham’s experience writing about fourteenth-century England.
75. Myth and Mystery: Novelist and contributor to the New York Times Rick Riordan is a mystery writer and you can read about his latest work on this site.
76. Type M for Murder: Learn a little bit about murder mysteries from this multi-author blog.
77. Crime Fiction Dossier: If crime fiction is your thing, you’ll learn loads from this blog by David Montgomery.
78. Jungle Red: Six mystery writers contribute to this blog that talks about writing, life, love and much more.
79. Romancing the Blog: This blog is home to numerous romance novelists who post on just about everything.

Fiction Writing

Most creative writing falls into the category of fiction, so learn more about writing great novels and stories from these blogs.

80. Advanced Fiction Writing: Written by the "mad professor" of fiction writing, this blog is geared towards inspiring you and getting you writing.
81. Writing Fiction: Here you’ll find a lively discussion about writing and publishing novels and short fiction.
82. Killer Fiction: With five published authors contributing to this blog, you’ll get loads of tips and posts on writing.
83. Ginny’s Fiction Writing Blog: Ginny Wiehardt posts about fiction writing in this About.com blog.
84. Becoming a Fiction Writer: This blogger is following her dream of becoming a fiction writer.
85. Blog Fiction: If you plan on taking to the net with your writing, this blogger can give you all kinds of tips on doing it right.
86. Fiction Writers Review: The writers who run this blog are all about reviewing books but they also discuss what works and what makes truly great fiction.
87. Angela Booth’s Writing Blog: Whether you’re writing fiction or just freelancing, you’ll find helpful writing tips on this blog.
88. Fiction Writing: The Passionate Journey: You won’t become a great writer overnight. This blog can help you start and keep going along your journey to writing success.
89. Fiction Scribe: From grammar errors to book tours, this blog talks about a wide range of issues affecting fiction writers.

Poetry

If verse is more your thing, pay these helpful blogs a visit.

90. Avoiding the Muse: Doctor, blogger and author C. Dale Young maintains this blog as well as teaching an MFA program on writing.
91. Poetry Hut Blog: Keep up to date on the latest happenings in the poetry world with this blog.
92. Poet with a Day Job: Does the title of this blog remind you of yourself? Read this blogger’s posts on writing, reading and everyday life here.
93. 1,000 Black Lines: Posts on this blog are a single line long, some of which record daily events and others that read like lines of poetry.
94. The Best American Poetry: Learn about some of the best poetry out there through this blog.
95. harriet: The Poetry Foundation maintains this blog, which posts about happenings in the poetry world and speaks directly to you, the poet.
96. Poems at the Poetry Showcase: Contribute your poetry to this blog, or read the postings of others.
97. Poets.org: The American Academy of Poets lets you know about great poetry that’s out there through their blog.
98. Poetry and Poets in Rags: This blogger is both a salesman and a poet.
99. Silliman’s Blog: Here you’ll find informative posts on contemporary poets and their work.
100. Poets Who Blog: This blog is a great resource for poets, with writing contests, posts about work and more.

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www.bestcollegesonline.com

Sunday at the Skin Laundrette by Kathryn Simmonds

The World Won't Miss You for a While

Untie your boots and separate your toes,
ignore the compass wavering north/north-west.
Lie down with me you hillwalkers and rest

Quit trailing through the overcrowded streets
with tinkling bells, you child of Hare Krishna.
Hush. Unfurl your saffron robes. How sweet

the grass. And you, photographer of wars,
lie down and cap your lens. Ambassador,
take off your dancing shoes. There are no laws

by which you must abide oh blushing boy
with Stanley knife, no county magistrates
are waiting here to dress you down: employ

yourself with cutting up these wild flowers
as you like. Sous chef with baby guinea fowl
to stuff, surveillance officer with hours

to fill, and anorexic weighing up a meal,
lie down. Girl riding to an interview,
turn back before they force you to reveal

your hidey holes. Apprentice pharmacist,
leave carousels of second generation
happy pills. The long term sad. And journalist

with dreams, forget the man from Lancashire
who lost his tongue, the youth who found it,
kept it quivering in a matchbox for a year.

The Boys in the Fish Shop

This one winds a string of plastic parsley
around the rainbow trout,
punnets of squat lobster and marinated anchovy,
the dish of jellied eels
in which a spoon stands erect.
He's young, eighteen perhaps,
with acne like the mottled skin of some pink fish,
and there's gold in his ear, the hoop of a lure.
The others aren't much older,
bantering in the back room,
that den of stinking mysteries
where boxes are carried.

The fish lie around all day,
washed-up movie stars
stunned on their beds of crushed ice.
The boys take turns to stare
through the wide glass window,
hands on hips, an elbow on a broom,
lost for a moment in warm waters until
Yes darling, what can I get you?
and their knives return to the task,
scraping scales in a sequin shower,
splitting parcels of scarlet and manganese.
Their fingers know a pound by guesswork,
how to unpeel smoked salmon,
lay it fine as lace on cellophane.
A girl walks past, hair streaming,
and the boy looks up,
still gripping his knife, lips parting in a slack O.

Talking to Yourself

It starts with sounds of which you're unaware:
the window, opening, gives a rusting sigh,
saying something, although there's no one there.

The bath brims over while you ask the air
what's the point? The air makes no reply.
It's used to sounds of which you're unaware.

Children see you chattering and stare,
and mothers with their trolleys wonder why
you're whispering, although there's no one there,

just artichokes, an avocado pear –
they cannot tell you how to live and die,
they're lipless, though they may still be aware.

Inside the church the shadows lisp a prayer,
and votive candles clamber to the sky,
insisting something, although there's no one there:

the priest has gone, the altar's been stripped bare.
You've never prayed, but now you kneel and try:
it starts with sounds of which you're unaware, saying something, although there's no one there.

• Extract from Sunday at the Skin Laundrette by Kathryn Simmonds, published by Seren Books.

Buy Sunday at The Skin Laundrette at the Guardian bookshop

--

Kathryn Simmonds, The Guardian, Friday 29 August 2008

Magazine fiction's golden age can never be repeated

Magazine fiction from the 1890s-1950 gave us some of our most-loved characters from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot. With magazines in decline, where to now? The Lady?

The umpteenth return of the Return (of Sherlock Holmes) and the popular success of Avatar are apt reminders that we're a storytelling species with a dominant narrative gene somewhere in our DNA. We simply cannot get enough of What Happened Next?

Avatar, for all its counter-cultural, eco-friendly credentials, is a product of the Hollywood machine, but Holmes and Watson come from somewhere else: the golden age of British magazine fiction that has never been – indeed, could never be – repeated.

1. Sherlock Holmes
2. Production year: 2009
3. Countries: Australia, Rest of the world, UK, USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 128 mins
6. Directors: Guy Ritchie
7. Cast: Bronagh Gallagher, Eddie Marsan, Geraldine James, Hans Matheson, James Fox, Jude Law, Kelly Reilly, Mark Strong, Rachel McAdams, Robert Downey Jr., William Hope
8. More on this film

As Selina Hastings writes in her excellent new biography of Somerset Maugham, another classic storyteller: "In the 1890s the literary market was rapidly expanding, focused on a large, educated middle class, with dozens of new magazines and periodicals launched every year and more than 400 publishing houses in London alone." (The parallels with the 1990s and the new media boom are striking). This was the age that threw up Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, the Jeeves and Wooster series and finally, in the 1920s, the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie, and her Poirot and Miss Marple series.

Every one of these has been rendered cinematically for a mass audience on several occasions. We like stories, and especially when they are accompanied by appealing, strong and identifiable characters who can be interpreted by stars.

The postwar era, roughly 1950 to 2000, was far poorer in this genre, for several reasons. The novel became postmodern; in popular mass-market fiction, perhaps only James Bond qualifies as an heir to Captain Hook, Toad of Toad Hall and Hercule Poirot, and Fleming was always more than a touch Edwardian in his instincts (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, for instance). Popular magazines were dead or dying; film and TV had not yet begun to fill the gap (as they are beginning to do now; HBO's House, for example, bears a big, and fully acknowledged, debt to Sherlock Holmes). A hundred years or so after Conan Doyle, your ambitious genre writer is as likely to be working in film and TV as fiction or magazines.

In more recent times, the only fictional character to rival Holmes has been Harry Potter, who exhibits several quite distinct Edwardian traits (he's a strange orphan boy who is sent off to come of age in a public school). The more I write this blog, the more I wonder why no one has written on this theme before. Perhaps they have: the interconnections are certainly intriguing, and they all have to do with the growth of the print media at the turn of the 20th century.

The only really distinguished example of a writer consciously creating a strong identifiable character who can inhabit a series of books is John le Carré's George Smiley. No surprise to find BBC Radio 4 serialising all the Smiley books in the coming year. For the rest, the climate is no longer propitious to serial fiction, though I see that the rejuvenated Lady magazine, under Rachel Johnson, has begun to explore the possibilities of popular genre fiction with the launch of Jessica Ruston's serial. In the art of the story, there are only so many ways to skin a cat.

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Robert McCrum, The Guardian, Monday 25 January

Where a writer is from is neither here nor there

Passport control at Gatwick Airport.

We should beware of paying more attention to a writer's nationality than their fiction.

In the literary world, there is perhaps nothing more insulting than being labelled "insular". Any accusation – such as Nobel prize permanent secretary Horace Engdahl's 2008 comments about the parochialism of American letters – is damaging, hurtful and also guilt-inducing. Insularity, after all, is inimical to literature, the opposite of fiction's artistic goal of understanding others. And it's not just writers who are shamed by the allegation. Publishers and, by implication, readers are often indicted on similar charges, their rigid tastes blamed for the shockingly low availability of fiction in translation.

The idea of insularity cropped up in a hugely enjoyable and occasionally bristly recent panel discussion between Aleksandar Hemon, AS Byatt and Tom McCarthy. Together to celebrate the launch of Best European Fiction 2010 – which Hemon edited – the three novelists gave a fascinating insight into what European fiction meant to them, where its boundaries were drawn and what, if anything, bound it together. While the conversation was provocative and illuminating, it was a single comment from AS Byatt that stuck with me as I picked up the anthology later that night. Byatt – about whose fiction I may be critical, but whose understanding, perception and passion for world literature is inspiring – mournfully bemoaned the fact that she knew only one Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. It was a frustration that seemed both entirely genuine and at the same time slightly acquisitive – as though she saw literature as a sort of Risk board, with Albania a weak point of entry that needed bolstering.

It wasn't hard to see her point: for a reader as avid and engaged as Byatt, to be ignorant of writing from anywhere on the globe is to miss out on new voices, new methods of expression, new windows on different cultures. But to me she seemed to be going at it all wrong. Does it really matter that she's only read one Albanian novelist? Is it acceptable to know two Belgian writers but for them both be Francophone rather than Dutch speaking? In short, does it really make a difference where the hell these people are from?

If there's an answer to this question, Best European Fiction 2010 isn't the place to find it. It does not claim to be a complete overview of a continent's literature, nor does it confer national-writer status on those sandwiched between its yellow covers. As Zadie Smith writes in her preface, "Anthologies are ill-fitting things – one size does not fit all." What it offers, instead, is a partial snapshot of Europe's concerns, a whistle-stop tour of old and emerging literary territories, some of which are familiar (Alistair Gray's Scotland; Victor Pelevin's Russia), others discovered for the first time.

Hemon has done an astonishing job in lighting up the map of Europe, opening the doors to these writers, many of whom – Michał Witkowski, Antonio Fian and Ornela Vorpsi in particular – I hope will become more widely known in the English-speaking world. But it hasn't encouraged me to seek out more Polish, Austrian and Albanian literature. Nor has it made me feel that I need to look for countries not included in the collection and find out about their cultural heritage. Their sensibilities as writers are necessarily bound up in their particular upbringings and cultures: centring on them simply as Poles, Austrians or Albanians is to denigrate their status as authors. As readers we should resist tokenism as much as insularity.

It's anticipated that the Best European Fiction anthology will become an annual publication, which should go some way to bringing such exceptional voices to the attention of anglophone readers. If this is the case, this volume will certainly become a highlight of the cultural year. But I hope that in future editions, the writers will be arranged alphabetically, their country of origin left as nothing more than an interesting endnote at the back of the book.

--

Stuart Evers, Wednesday 27 January 2010

2009 was the year of the short story

Alice Munro's Man Booker International win boosted the profile of the short story form.

--

Alice Munro won the Man Booker International, Raymond Carver's widow published a revised edition of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and fine collections appeared from old hands and debutantes. This year proved that reports of the short story's death have been greatly exaggerated.

2009 has proved that rumours of the death of the short story – so often forecast that almost every review of almost every collection seems duty-bound to repeat and thus propagate it – are greatly exaggerated. The consensus running through the end-of-year reviews is that it's been a vintage year for short fiction, and I agree. I come here to praise the short story, not to bury it.

Starting at the top, one of the world's greatest living short story specialists, and one of its greatest writers full-stop, took the 2009 Man Booker International prize. Canadian Alice Munro published her 14th collection, Too Much Happiness, earlier this year. A powerful grouping of stories more violent than her normal work, it shows her enormous talent remains undiminished as she nears her ninth decade.

Mavis Gallant is already well into hers, and while no new work is forthcoming an edition of her previously uncollected stories, The Cost of Living, has just been published. As for the brand new, this year saw collections from big names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, James Lasdun, and this parish's own AL Kennedy.

Good work from the living, then, but notable new collections issued even from beyond the grave. Raymond Carver's Beginners reinstates the writer's original drafts of the stories that made up his definitive 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; stories that his editor Gordon Lish famously and controversially reduced in length, in some cases cutting up to 78% of Carver's prose. I had misgivings before reading it, but Beginners is a fascinating document. The decision to publish these versions is controversial, but the logic behind his widow Tess Gallagher's desire to show the "connective tissue" between his pre- and post-Lish work seems sound. Additionally the endnotes, wherein the editors detail what revisions were made where and when, are like morsels of crack for Carver geeks.

This has also been an excellent year for debuts. I read David Vann's Legend of a Suicide and Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned back to back, and while their shared interests – hunting, ichthyology, destructive rages, divorce, abuse and guns – might lie heavily on their readers' psyches, the quality of the writing precludes any chance of leaving them depressed. Both superb, Vann's book in particular suggests the arrival of a significant talent; one who can marry tremendous plot twists to an appealingly downbeat style that fans of Carver and Cormac McCarthy alike will thrill to.

In case you're wondering what Legend of a Suicide, supposedly a novel, is doing in a blog about short stories, it was originally published as a story collection in America. Vann told the Guardian he prefers the way the book is being sold in the UK, but really it sits somewhere between the two forms: the stories are discrete, but at the same time are all reactions to or descriptions of a single central event. Another book that hovers in this enjoyable and I think fertile space between the story collection and the novel is this year's Pulitzer winner, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, a story cycle set in Crosby, Maine, and presided over by the retired schoolteacher of the title. It's sold upwards of 400,000 copies so far: impressive for a literary novel, extraordinary for short fiction.

Of course, all this jubilation would be Panglossian without some acknowledgement of the short story market's real and present downsides. In the US it's commonplace for short story writers to get a deal for their first collection only on the proviso that a novel follows, a business practice that casts short story-writing as apprentice work. In the UK it's worse still, with story collections treated like dirty secrets to be snuck out in disguise (pace Penguin's strategy with Vann), with only a determined study of the back cover revealing the truth. And I don't know if it's a case of reading practices following publishing's lead or vice versa, but I'm constantly surprised and disheartened by the number of readers who tell me they don't read short stories, as if they were a homogenous type that could be not to your taste like, say, policiers.

I do see more reason to celebrate than to mourn, however. Radio 4 broadcasts nearly 150 stories a year; the Atlantic's recent decision to sell short stories via its Kindle store inspires hope for a vibrant market for individually sold shorter works, while flash fiction and sites dedicated to the short story continue to proliferate online.

This year saw the US publication of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a particular favourite of mine, whose sharp, hilarious, often minuscule fictions have long had a small but dedicated following. She's the next subject in the short story series I've been writing for the last couple of years, and in the words of the New Yorker her body of work "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal." Hamish Hamilton have just picked up the UK rights, so British readers as yet unfamiliar with her will soon have an even better chance to find out how good she is. It looks like 2010's already shaping up to be another good year.

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Chris Power, The Guardian, Tuesday 29 December 2009

Spats, symbols and posthumous publications: 2009, a year in books

Copies of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol on sale in London. Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images.

It was the year when poetry made the front pages - for good and bad reasons - when Dan Brown broke publishing records and when everyone from Mark Twain to Vladimir Nabokov brought out books from beyond the grave. We take a look back at the literary events that hit the headlines in 2009.

January

2009 was the year of Dan Brown, e-readers and poetic spats. Thankfully, Dan Brown is still a few months away, but the other two hit the ground running right at the start of the year. The first sales figures for the Sony e-reader are released and show that Waterstone's sold almost 30,000 of the readers since the launch in September, while downloads of electronic books from the chain's site passed the 75,000 mark. And the Oxford professor of poetry contest kicks off. Names under discussion at this stage include British poets Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Simon Armitage, Jon Stallworthy, JH Prynne and John Wilkinson, along with Australian poet Les Murray, US poet Jorie Graham and New Zealand native Fleur Adcock. There is nary a mention of Ruth Padel and Derek Walcott. If only it was to stay that way ...

Meanwhile, Wendy Cope rules herself out of the running for the poet laureateship, calling it a poisoned chalice that should be abolished. In other, less fraught, poetry news, Jen Hadfield wins TS Eliot prize for poetry with her second collection, Nigh-No-Place. Sadly, the poet Mick Imlah, who was also shortlisted for the prize, dies this month, aged 52. We also say goodbye to Pulitzer prize-winning poet WD Snodgrass, Rumpole of the Bailey creator Sir John Mortimer and Rabbit writer John Updike. Neil Gaiman makes a start on what will be a vintage year by winning the Newbery for The Graveyard Book while Sebastian Barry wins the £25,000 Costa book of the year award. Joseph O'Neill only won plaudits for his novel about cricket and post-9/11 New York, Netherland, but it does turn out to have been the literary critics' read of choice last year.

2009 is also set to be the year of intriguing library news and it gets underway this month with the jailing, for two years, of an Iranian academic who stripped pages out of ancient books from the British Library.

Overseas, there's strife in Asterix world as Albert Uderzo's daughter, Sylvie, accuses the Asterix co-creator of betraying his hero, selling out to the businessmen and denying "all the values" she was brought up with - "independence, fraternity, conviviality and resistance" - after he authorised the series to continue after his death. He responds by calling her accusations "undignified" and an insult to Asterix readers. Turkey restores the citizenship of its most famous 20th-century poet, Nazim Hikmet, over 50 years after it branded him a traitor. And finally, Mills & Boon and the Rugby Football League team up to publish a series of books featuring tall, dark and handsome rugby heroes - minus cauliflower ears - and their glamorous love interests. They promise "jet-set locations, hunky alpha male heroes and hot sex, but in a rugby context."

February

James Patterson remains Britain's most borrowed author, with the top three positions unchanged from last year - Patterson is closely followed by children's author Jacqueline Wilson and the author of the Rainbow Magic series, Daisy Meadows. She may not get much in the way of public lending rights dosh, but JK Rowling can bask in with the adoration of the French – this month the country honours her with the title of knight of France's prestigious Legion of Honour. She also wins Stephen King's approval, albeit in comparison with Twilight's Stephenie Meyer. "The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good," opined the horror writer, for whom it's a busy month: King also writes a novella, Ur, exclusively for the new version of Amazon's Kindle.

It's a good month for protests, too: Margaret Drabble lets rip about about WH Smith's new deal with BAA, which will see it running all the bookshops in BAA's seven UK airports and Margaret Atwood pulls out of the Dubai literary festival over the 'blacklisting' of Geraldine Bedell's The Gulf Between Us, before declaring that she had been misled, and agreeing to take part in a debate on censorship by video link. It is, as she herself puts it, a "dog's breakfast".

In poetry, Ruth Padel emerges as frontrunner for the prestigious post of Oxford University professor of poetry and Carol Ann Duffy is now odds-on favourite to get the laureateship.

In library news, the British Library spends £83,000 on The Tin Book, the futurist manifesto co-authored by a fascist-sympathising Italian artist who, 100 years ago, said all libraries should be destroyed.

There are wins for Julia Gregson with the romantic novel of the year award for East of the Sun and Naomi Klein with the inaugural Warwick prize for The Shock Doctrine.

We say a sad farewell to one of the best-known Arabic novelists of the 20th century, Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, and Whitbread-winning author Christopher Nolan.

March

This month's controversy comes courtesy of Julie Myerson and her book, The Lost Child, which deals with the author's decision to lock her 17-year-old son, Jake, out of the family home over his use of cannabis. In a battle played out in the national newspapers, Jake describes his mother as "insane" and "obscene" and the book is published two months early due to the uproar. And uh-oh - Derek Walcott joins the Oxford professor of poetry race.

There is plenty of unexpected publishing news: lost Mark Twain stories are to be released, two new Roberto Bolaño manuscripts are found among his papers in Spain, and an unfinished David Foster Wallace novel, The Pale King, will be published. However, distinguished Russian scholar Orlando Figes's latest book on life under Stalin won't be published in Russia due to "political pressure".

This month's British Library story reveals that the library has "mislaid" 9,000 books with some not having been seen in well over half a century; the Bodleian, meanwhile, moves millions of books from dreamy Oxford to Swindon.

Matt Haig wins the Blue Peter award for Shadow Forest, controversial Egyptian novel Youssef Ziedan's Beelzebub wins the International Prize for Arabic fiction and Seamus Heaney wins the £40,000 David Cohen prize. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais wins the Diagram prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Ben Okri releases a new poem on Twitter and 65% of those polled in a survey admit lying about reading classic novels with Nineteen Eighty-Four coming top in a poll of the UK's guilty reading secrets. Finally, novelist Colm Toíbín tells it like it is when he says that the only aspect of the writing life that gives him any pleasure is getting paid.

April

Fancy living in Peach Pie Street? Wincanton in Somerset, twinned with Ankh-Morpork, names streets on a new housing estate after Terry Pratchett's fantasy series Discworld.

Birmingham plans the UK's largest ever lending library, and the earliest-known book jacket is discovered at the Bodleian.

Amazon finds itself at the centre of a censorship row after a number of gay and lesbian titles, by authors including Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, were taken off the online sales charts. It was "embarrassing and hamfisted" said a shamefaced Amazon in a suitably grovelling apology. A Pride and Prejudice and Zombies 'mash-up' becomes an unexpected bestseller, and the Espresso Book Machine, which can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait, is launched in Blackwell's in London. Margaret Drabble announces that she will not write another novel because she is worried about repeating herself.

There are SF wins for Ursula K Le Guin, who gets her sixth Nebula, while the Arthur C Clarke award goes to Ian R MacLeod's Song of Time. The SF world has a big loss with the death of JG Ballard and we also say goodbye to poet UA Fanthorpe. There are no poetic barneys this month but don't worry – May is a biggie.

May

It all starts decorously enough in the poetry world, with near-universal support for the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the first female poet laureate. And then that pesky poetry professorship contest has to go and ruin everything. As the fiasco reaches its climax, Derek Walcott resigns from the race after earlier sexual harassment claims made against him were brought up via an anonymous letter campaign. Oxford refuses calls to postpone the election and Ruth Padel is elected the first female Oxford professor of poetry. She spends the next week fighting to keep her post after it emerges that she tipped off newspapers about claims of sexual impropriety against Walcott, but finally resigns, at the Hay festival, less than 10 days after her election. Oxford university calls for "a period of reflection" and accepts that it is unlikely that it will have anybody in the post by October when the current incumbent steps down.

The tawdry affair rather overshadowed Alice Munro's well-deserved win of the £60,000 Man Booker international prize, and a Hay festival which saw Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu call for quiet and tolerance, Sarah Waters apologise for not putting any lesbians in her new novel, The Little Stranger, Kamila Shamsie make connections across the whole of the 20th century and Joan Bakewell return with her first novel.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Ross launches a Twitter book club and sends his first choice soaring up the bestseller charts (but it all seemed to have petered out by the summer), Geoff Dyer wins the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction with Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and we bid farewell to novelist Marilyn French.

June

Poetry continues to generate controversy, as Carol Ann Duffy chooses as her first subject for a poem as laureate - the MPs' expenses scandal and the corrosiveness of politics on politicians. However, there is also the discovery of Timmy the Tug, a 40-page children's poem written by Ted Hughes in the 1950s. Two unpublished Poirot short stories are also found in Agatha Christie's holiday home.

JD Salinger launches legal action against an author who has purportedly written a spinoff "sequel" to Catcher in the Rye, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

This month's library news is fun - the British Library's head of modern manuscripts agrees to help with haymaking on John Berger's French farm in return for the donation of the author's literary archive.

Anthony Browne becomes the children's laureate, the Carnegie Medal is posthumously awarded to Siobhan Dowd for Bog Child, Marilynne Robinson wins Orange prize and Philip Hoare's study of whales, Leviathan, wins the Samuel Johnson prize. Debut novelist Michael Thomas beat authors including Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates to take the €100,000 (£85,000) Impac Dublin prize.

We said goodbye to fantasy author David Eddings.

July

A quiet month in the books world, but a "sad day for the world of smut" as the women's erotica imprint Black Lace stops commissioning new titles. All is not lost, however: Playboy acquires the first serial rights to The Original of Laura, the unfinished novel Nabokov wanted to be destroyed.

Ernest Hemingway is unveiled as a failed KGB spy.

There were goodbyes to Frank McCourt, father of the misery memoir, novelist Gordon Burn and Booker-winner Stanley Middleton.

August

Much summer silliness on offer as the literati try to guess who inspired Sebastian Faulks to create an embittered literary reviewer whose only joy in life is to destroy the careers of authors by writing excoriating reviews of their books in national newspapers, in his novel A Week in December. But the novelist also has to defuse a row after he is quoted in an interview dismissing the Qu'ran as "just the rantings of a schizophrenic" with "no ethical dimension". Bloomsbury also lands in hot water after Australian author Justine Larbalestie's new novel, Liar, about a short-haired black girl called Micah, is published with a photograph of a long-haired white girl on its jacket. The news that William Golding's private papers, which he gave to his biographer John Sunderland, reveal that he tried to rape a 15-year-old girl as a teenager, is met with shock. Travel writers are furious as the Office of Fair Trading decides against investigating WH Smith's deal to stock only Penguin's overseas guides at its travel stores.

Dan Brown may have topped Oxfam's list of most donated books but there are no Robert Langdon adventures on Obama's holiday reading list which, we learn, contains the rather more high-powered Thomas L Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded – subtitled Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How It Can Renew America – and Pulitzer prize-winner David McCullough's biography of the second US president, John Adams. Wuthering Heights tops the classics bestseller lists after it is repackaged as the 'favourite book' of Stephenie Meyer's Bella and Edward with a cover styled on her Twilight series.

Neil Gaiman's run of success with the Graveyard Book continues with a Hugo award, and Michael Holroyd wins the James Tait Black prize for his book about 19th-century Shakespearean actors, A Strange Eventful History, 42 years after his wife Margaret Drabble won it.

September

September sees the announcement of the Man Booker shortlist, which pits Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt and Sarah Waters against JM Coetzee, Simon Mawer and Adam Foulds, but it's fair to say that the month belongs Dan Brown. The Lost Symbol is published and becomes the best-read adult novel in publishing history, setting adult fiction sales records despite being a steaming pile of clunk. Thankfully, one poll Brown doesn't top is "the piece of writing that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years": Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude gets that one.

A Google doodle honours HG Wells in a mysterious way but the search engine's $125m deal agreement with US publishers to digitise millions of books is postponed by a judge after widespread criticism. Some upbeat library news: readers can now borrow books from more than 4,000 public libraries regardless of where they live.

Simon Van Booy wins the €35,000 Frank O'Connor award for Love Begins in Winter, Graham Joyce wins the British Fantasy award with Memoirs of a Master Forger and poet Tony Harrison is awarded the first ever PEN/Pinter prize for a writer following in Harold Pinter's footsteps. We bid farewell to Keith Waterhouse.

October

The Booker goes to Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall and she briefly pushes Dan Brown into second place on Amazon's sales charts.

The Google digital library row rumbles on with the German chancellor Angela Merkel coming out against it, while Amazon launches the Kindle.

A Winnie the Pooh sequel sees Christopher Robin back in Hundred Acre Wood, and a film adaption of Where the Wild Things Are that leads the book's author Maurice Sendak to tell parents worried that is too frightening for children to "go to hell". Also going to hell, as far as the US religious right are concerned, are readers of And Tango Makes Three. The story of two male penguins raising an orphaned chick tops the US banned books list but also races up the Amazon charts.

The familial upsets of earlier in the year are put to one side as Asterix turns 50 and France celebrates in style.

Don Paterson wins the Forward prize for poetry with his collection Rain, TS Eliot is named the nation's favourite poet, Herta Müller wins the Nobel prize for literature and Mal Peet wins the Guardian children's fiction prize.

November

More poetry shenanigans as Andrew Motion defends his use of 'found' material in a poem against a charge of plagiarism and Nicolas Sarkozy provokes the French left by mischievously suggesting he bestow the country's greatest posthumous honour upon Albert Camus - transferring the Algerian-born author's remains to the Panthéon, the resting place for heroes of France, on the 50th anniversary of his death in January.

The new Nobel laureate comes under fire from a former member of the Romanian secret police who admits spying on her but claims that the writer "has a psychosis and has no contact with external reality." There's much excitement as upmarket callgirl blogger Belle Du Jour unmasks herself as a research scientist, and some potentially cheering news as Stephenie Meyer admits to Oprah that she is "a little burned out on vampires" and may not write another Twilight novel. The latest move in the Google books battle sees the search giant offering some concessions.

This month we learn that Roberto Bolaño would rather have been a cop than an author, that Sarah Palin's Going Rogue has actually managed to sell quite a few copies and Stephen King is plotting a sequel to The Shining.

More library loveliness as a former telephone box is transformed into a mini village library. It's happy 30th birthday to the London Review of Books and more celebrations for Neil Gaiman as The Graveyard Book picks up yet another gong, this time the Booktrust teenage prize. Su Tong's political fable The Boat to Redemption takes the Man Asia literary prize, Evie Wyld's debut After the Fire, a Still Small Voice beats Aravind Adiga and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and Philip Ardargh's Grubtown Tales wins the Roald Dahl funny prize. The American winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell, wins the Bad Sex award for such inspired lines as "I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg" in his novel The Kindly Ones.

And it's goodbye Borders, as the bookstore goes into administration.

December

Petina Gappah wins the Guardian first book award with her collection of short stories about Zimbabwe, An Elegy for Easterly, and poet Kate Clanchy wins the BBC National Short Story award.

Otherwise, the year ends as it starts – with poets, Dan Brown, Google and e-books. Oxford university announces that it will reform voting rules for the poetry professor post, but it's too late for Derek Walcott: he's already accepted the post of professor of poetry – at Essex. Dan Brown is Christmas number one, Ursula K Le Guin accuses the Authors Guild of 'deal with the devil' over its Google settlement, and Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day.

New words this year included jeggings, tweetups, staycation and the absolutely splendid snollygosters.

All in all, 2009 was quite a year. Fasten your seatbelts for the sequel ...

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Michelle Pauli, The Guardian, Wednesday 30 December 2009

Pullman rewrites the story of Christ

The greatest story ever told (as debated here) has been given a new leash of life by His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman.

In a new project, Pullman has written an alternative Bible passage re-imagining the fate of Jesus Christ, who, it is written, was killed by the Romans (or not).

Talking to The Daily Telegraph, a friend of the author said: “He has written what would have happened if Jesus had had a fair trial. He knows it will be controversial, but he has some serious points to make.”

Pullman will read his reworking or Christ’s fate at the Globe Theatre on Thursday 19 November as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations of Reprieve, an organisation which campaigns for prisoner rights.

The author is not new to controversy with the church. An honorary associate of the National Secular Society, several of Pullman’s books have been criticised by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. His Dark Materials, Pullman’s collection of fantasy novels which contain much discussed religious allegories, have been seen as a direct negation of Christian author, C S Lewis’, The Chronicles of Narnia, which have been criticised by Pullman.

He is also often lambasted for an interview in which he reportedly said: “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.”

Despite all this confrontation the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has suggested His Dark Materials be taught as part of the religious education curriculum in schools.

The Reprieve event will be hosted by Jon Snow and will also feature John le Carré and Martha Lane Fox.

Discussion:
Do you think Pullman has gone too far in his atheist quest with this latest project? Do you feel we should question religion more in literature? What was the last faith themed piece of writing you read?

Words: Dean Samways

Watch a documentary on Philip Pullman below:

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Dear Samways, The Scribbler, 19 November 2009

The Green Card maze!

The Green Card process for acquiring Permanent Resident status in the United States can be a real maze. I should know - I've been building up to the end of the process for six years. I'm pleased to say I've now received my 'Conditional' Green Card. This means that in two years my case is reviewed again (with a second interview).

At that time, if all is well, I receive the holy grail of Permanent Resident Status - a 10-year card instead of the conditional 2-year card. But that's all in the future...

For now, I'm happy to make it through Stage 1 of the Green Card good times. If you have any questions about the process, feel free to ask them in the Comments to this post. I can at least convey my experience to you, which may be helpful.

Cheers, America!

FBI buries VS Naipaul alive!

An FBI report has mistakenly declared the Nobel laureate dead

Eye-popping news ... VS Naipaul. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Reports of the death – and the degree of royal preferment – of Nobel laureate VS Naipaul have it seems been greatly exaggerated. A bizarre discovery by the website The Smoking Gun – the one which also uncovered James Frey's porkies – found that an FBI agent referred to "the late Lord VS Naipaul, a Nobel prize winning author" in court documents unsealed yesterday.

Now, Naipaul might not have published a new book since 2007's A Writer's People, or won a literary prize since he took the Nobel in 2001 for "having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories", but he's still very much alive.

The FBI, rather confirming the estimation of a character in David Mamet's film Homicide that they "couldn't find Joe Louis in a bowl of rice", also – posthumously, as it were – elevated Sir Vidia to the House of Lords.

The poor man – it must be a very strange feeling to become a "late". One consolation, however, may be that he shares this profoundly uncomfortable experience with Alfred Nobel. Nobel, whose renown during his own lifetime rested on having invented dynamite, was profoundly shaken when a French newspaper rather precipitously declared that "le marchand de la mort est mort". After that trauma, the would-be pacifist's strategy for redeeming his name was to create a set of enormously generous prizes.

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Alison Flood
Wednesday 28 October 2009
The Guardian

(c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009

Guy Fawkes Night, UK and New Zealand

Guy Fawkes Night (often referred to as Bonfire Night) is celebrated with bonfires and fireworks on November 5, or the closest Friday or Saturday night.

Until the nineteenth century there was a special Church of England service for this commemoration in the Book of Common Prayer. Guy Fawkes Day became a public holiday in 1606 when it was proclaimed by an Act of Parliament. In commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot on this day in 1605, when Guy Fawkes and his comrades tried to blow up King James I and the whole English Parliament, English people still burn a 'guy' in effigy.

Traditionally the guy's cap was made of paper and knotted with ribbon-like paper strips. The dummy carried matches in one hand and a dark lantern in the other. Children would go around the streets asking for money, saying “Please to remember the guy!” In 1850 in Britain there was a strong wave of anti-Catholic sentiment, and the guy was often in the likeness of the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster!

Happy Bonfire Night, England!

Oxford slips in international university ranking as Asian rivals 'snap at heels'

Polly Curtis, education editor
Thursday October 8 2009
The Guardian
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Oxford University has slipped down an international league table of the world's top universities which also reveals the advance of academia in Asia that will soon pose a challenge to the Ivy League and Oxbridge.

Oxford fell from fourth to joint fifth place with Imperial College London in the QS/Times Higher Education rankings, published today, widening the gap with Cambridge which was rated second in the world. University College London (UCL) leapfrogged Oxford coming fourth after Yale, Cambridge and Harvard.

Overall the UK still punches above its weight, second only to the US. It has four out of the top 10 slots and 18 in the top 100. But there has been a significant fall in the number of North American universities in the top 100, from 42 in 2008 to 36 in 2009. The number of Asian universities in the top 100 increased from 14 to 16. The University of Tokyo, at 22, is the highest ranked Asian university, ahead of the University of Hong Kong at 24.

Leading UK universities said institutions in Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong were "snapping at the heels" of western institutions arguing they needed more funding to compete on the global stage.

Earlier this week the outgoing vice-chancellor of Oxford warned the university needs more than ?1bn investment in the next decade to bring "unfit for purpose" facilities up to a world-class standard. John Hood said the university was budgeting to make a loss for the fourth year in a row.

"From a financial perspective these are genuinely worrying times," he said. "Government budgets are over-stressed and endowments are extremely volatile, as are the markets for our entrepreneurial activities."Yesterday Oxford expressed surprise at its fall in the table. A spokesperson said: "League table rankings can vary as they often use different methods to measure success, but Oxford University's position is surprising given that Oxford ? has come first in every national league table."

The rankings are based on an international survey of 9,000 academics, how influential the institution's research is and measures of teaching quality and ability to recruit staff and students abroad.

Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group of Universities, said: "The broad message of these tables is clear - the leading UK research universities are held in high esteem internationally but countries like China and Korea, which are investing massively in their best institutions, are snapping at our heels.

"The precise accuracy of league tables like this can be debated but there is no mistaking the alarm bell warning that our success is at risk if we as a nation don't take action to fight off such fierce competition."

She added that the UK was less well-funded than its competitors and if public spending cuts hit budgets they would be under increasing pressure. Universities are currently arguing for improved funding in a forthcoming review of the student finance system, to be launched by the government within weeks. They are increasingly calling for fees to be increased to safeguard the quality of their teaching.

The league table rates teaching quality according to the staff to student ratio. A recent report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England suggested some students were struggling to get enough contact time with tutors.

Phil Baty, the deputy editor of Times Higher Education magazine which published the tables, said: "Oxford comes out with perfect scores on reputation but citations per staff have slipped slightly while UCL has improved dramatically. It's very tight at the very top so a relatively small change can move the pecking order. Spending on higher education in Asia is phenomenal and that's why you see their results going up."

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guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009