Creative » Curious Book Fans

Q&A with Charley Boorman

26 Jan 2012 By eilidhcatriona
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Charley Boorman is an actor, traveller and biker. In 2004 he travelled round the world on motorbikes with best friend Ewan McGregor. He entered the most dangerous race on earth, the Dakar Rally, in 2006, and reunited with Ewan in 2007 for Long Way Down, riding through Africa. Charley then went on to travel from Ireland to Sydney in By Any Means, and from Sydney to Tokyo in Right to the Edge. Now he’s back with a brand new adventure – this time all in one country, in Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada. Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada From Newfoundland to the Rockies is now available on book and DVD at Amazon.

CBF: Charley, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to Curious Book Fans, we’re big fans of yours. Tell us a little bit about Extreme Frontiers – how did the idea come about and why did you choose Canada?

Charley Boorman: Ewan and I had gone through many different countries together including Canada. We travelled through the Rockies but there was a big fire so we didn’t actually get to see them due to the smoke!

Charley Boorman, interview

Dr. Dimsdale and Catherine the Great’s Fear of Smallpox

21 Jan 2012 By Guest
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Eva Stachniak brings us an exciting novel, The Winter Palace, about Catherine The Great’s early days and improbable rise to power as seen through the ever-watchful eyes of an all-but-invisible servant close to the throne. Eva was born in Wroclaw, Poland, and came to Canada in 1981. She has been a radio broadcaster and college English and Humanities lecturer. Her debut novel, Necessary Lies, won the Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and her second novel, Garden of Venus, has been translated into seven languages. Her third novel, The Winter Palace, has been published in Canada (Doubleday), US (Bantam) and the UK (Transworld). She lives in Toronto, where she is working on her second historical novel about Catherine the Great, The Empire of the Night. Curious Book Fans want to thank Eva for sharing some insight into the research she did for The Winter Palace.

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Smallpox had been one of Catherine the Great’s greatest fears. When she arrived in Russia at 14, a fiancée to the Grand Duke Peter, the disease almost destroyed her future. The Grand Duke contracted smallpox and, even though he eventually recovered, it disfigured his body and made him even more awkward and insecure than he had been before. In the dark, long weeks when Peter’s life hung in the balance, Catherine knew that had he died, she would have been sent back to Zerbst without much ceremony.

Eva Stachniak

The Red Ants: The Evolution of a Novel

13 Nov 2011 By Guest
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Curious Book Fans are grateful to author Martin Pevsner for revealing to our readers the creative process and the background of his second novel The Red Ants.

This last twelve months have been a time of great change for me. After fourteen years teaching English language at a local further education college in Oxford, mainly to asylum seekers and refugees, I quit my job. I found a new one a few weeks later. For the first time since graduating over twenty-five years ago I have found employment in a non-teaching capacity. It feels very liberating.

Equally exciting, I had my first book published this time last year, a novel called Divinity Road (Signal Books), set mainly in Oxford and Africa, that sought to describe the vulnerability of life as an asylum seeker (see review here). Needless to say much of the inspiration for the novel came from my relationships with students over the years.

Martin Pevsner

The Red Ants – Prologue

13 Nov 2011 By Guest
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©Martin Pevsner 2011

You wake though you can’t remember sleeping, one moment you’re hunched between lawnmower and wheelbarrow, sideways prone on damp shed floor, strands of dried grass clinging to your cheek, shivering cold in midnight hour. Then next you’re jerked alive, scrabbling to your feet, peering through smeary window at the pale dawn.

Someone’s lying in the garden no more than ten feet away. You peer more closely. The back is to you but the shape looks female. You are pretty sure she wasn’t there last night. You wonder if she could be asleep, imagine her stirring, sitting up, yawning. But you know it’s unlikely.

You stand for a few moments, your ear tuning in for sounds. At your feet lies the canvas bag filled with ipod and penknife, a few scrabbled clothes, your phone and the trumpet. You stand stock still straining to hear but the silence is eerie, no more screams of the hunted, no more back-and-forth calls of the huntsmen.

Martin Pevsner

Q&A with Sonia Faleiro

11 Oct 2011 By koshkha
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When Indian journalist Sonia Faleiro first met Mumbai dance bar girl Leela she couldn’t have imagined that five years later their experiences would lead to the creation of a critically acclaimed account of the young dancer’s life on the wrong side of the tracks. Curiousbookfans loved her book, Beautiful Thing – Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars and wanted to know more about Faleiro and her book. And if you’d like to know more too, we have three copies of Beautiful Thing to give away this month – check out the Forum for more details.

CBF:It seems like the world in which you researched your book is very different from the world you grew up in. How did you make your first contact with Mumbai dance bar culture and gain the trust of people from such a very different world?

Sonia Faleiro: If you’re a reporter in India reporting on marginalized communities for the English media it’s almost certain that your social and economic background, and therefore your life experiences, will be very different from those you write about.

interview, Sonia Faleiro

Q&A with Patrick Bishop

9 Jul 2011 By koshkha
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PATRICK BISHOP PHOTO IAN JONES At Curious Book Fans we’re always impressed at how far writers will go to research a book but going to war to gather material shows an extreme devotion to both duty and the creative process. Patrick Bishop’s long career as a journalist embedded with the army gives him a unique insight into conflict and has led to his book “Follow Me Home” being hailed as the first great novel of the Afghanistan war. Curious Book Fans, not surprising, wanted to know more.

CBF: Journalism can be a dangerous profession and I can imagine a soldier has lots of useful skills for dealing with the cut and thrust of reporting. What special skills does a journalist bring to life in a war zone?

Patrick Bishop: Nowadays you have to be pretty fit to survive an embed in Afghanistan.

interview, Patrick Bishop

Q&A with Essie Fox

27 Jun 2011 By elkiedee
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Essie Fox, author (The Somnambulist) Essie’s Fox novel set in Victorian London, The Somnambulist, published in May 2011, was quite a treat for fans of historical mysteries. She started her career as an illustrator and an editorial assistant but now she is becoming a master of Victorian gothic mystery novel. Dividing her time between Windsor and London, she is working on the second novel. After reviewing The Somnambulist we were curious to know more about research and story behind Essie’s literary debut.

CBF: What attracted you to the setting of Victorian England? What do you think is most interesting about that period?

Essie Fox: Oddly enough, when I first started to write I was planning on something contemporary. But every time I began, a character or some ‘item’ from the past would crop up and intrude on the novel’s plot – a letter found under some floorboards, or an antique ornament which had some past significance. Finally, I realised that these were the parts of the story that gave me most ‘excitement’ – and as I’ve always enjoyed reading Victorian novels, whether the old classics or modern day versions, I decided to take the bull by the horns and see if I could do it too.

Essie Fox, interview

Osama Must Die

17 May 2011 By Anjana Basu
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Mukul Deva’s ‘Lashkar’ series has many incidences which have later coincidentally appeared in real life. One such uncanny description is how ‘Osama is taken by US forces’ which is part of ‘Salim Must Die’, the book two of the series.

Now that the series is reading more and more like non-fiction, we asked Mukul Deva to give us his views of recent dramatic events and how they are reflected in his books.

CBF: Seriously how did you come up with the idea of the Americans kidnapping Osama? After all, at one level it does constitute an international crime?

Pakistan

Q&A with Abbas Kazerooni

29 Apr 2011 By koshkha
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Abbas Kazerooni One of the great pleasures of writing for Curious Book Fans is getting the opportunity to indulge your curiosity by carrying out a Q&A with the author of a book you’ve loved or admired. In the case of Abbas Kaazerooni’s book ‘On Two Feet and Wings‘ I knew within the first few pages that when I got to the end I would want to know more. It’s a fascinating and largely autobiographical account of leaving his homeland of Iran when he was just nine years old and having to make his own way in the world, first in Istanbul and later in the UK. As someone who has visited Iran and is fiercely interested in its history and culture, the placing of his story during the Iran-Iraq war meant this was always going to be right up my street. What I didn’t expect was how attached I would become to the young Abbas and how much I’d want to know about the man he has become and the lessons he hopes that people – young and older – will take from his book.

Abbas Kazerooni, interview

Q&A with Christie Watson

25 Mar 2011 By eilidhcatriona
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Christie Watson, interview In her debut novel, Tiny Sunbirds Far Away, Christie Watson writes about Nigeria, oil industry, violence. The story is of twelve year old Blessing and survival of family through challenges people face in that corner of the world. The innocence which child’s narration brings into such serious issues makes it an amazing book.
Christie Watson worked as a nurse for over ten years before joining UEA for her MA in Creative Writing, where she won the Malcolm Bradbury Bursary. We were curious to ask her few questions about her first book.

CBF: Firstly, as an introduction to this interview, can you tell us a bit about your own experience with Nigeria, particularly the Niger Delta where Tiny Sunbirds Far Away is mainly set?

Christie Watson: I first travelled to Nigeria over ten years ago after I met my Nigerian partner. I’d travelled to various other African countries before, and parts of West Africa, but nothing quite prepared me for how amazing a place Nigeria is.

Christie Watson, interview

Five Minutes with Oliver Burkeman

17 Mar 2011 By koshkha
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Oliver Burkeman writes for the Guardian and is best known for his column which claims that it will not change your life. He won the Foreign Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Oliver recently published a book Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. He doesn’t claim that he will find who moved your cheese or how to get out of the box during brainstorm. He is on his quest to make us just slightly happier with the help of a simple kitchen timer. Obviously, we were curious to know more.

CBF: You’ve obviously read a mountain of self-help books in your research for this book – can you recommend one or two you consider worth the paper they’re written on and maybe (if it’s not too unprofessional) a couple you’d advise everyone to avoid.

interview, Oliver Burkeman

Q&A with Martin Pevsner

25 Jan 2011 By koshkha
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Martin Pevsner recently published his first novel, Divinity Road. Our reviewer praised him as “a writer to put on your watch list if this multi-dimensional tour de force is anything to go by”. koshkha was curious to learn more about stories and thoughts behind the book.
Martin lives and works in Oxford but has spent time in Cameroon, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

CBF: I chose the book because I recognised the reference to the road where part of the story is set. I’d guess that’s not why you chose it though. What was the thinking behind the name?

Martin Pevsner: I had a different name for the novel originally – Companions of the Garden – a reference to the Qur’an. An agent told me people browsing in a bookshop would presume it was a gardening book.

interview, Martin Pevsner