Thursday 3 October 2013

Links

"These are personal stories and the science informs the narrative and the opinion being expressed.  The natural world is a multi-sensory space and has multiple significances for each individual.
‘Autobiographical’ is often used as an insult in regard to women’s writing, as if by expressing factual data through the medium of one’s own life somehow reduces its credibility.  But it could be seen that scientific objectivity in regard to the sensory world is a bit of a fallacy anyway.
We can only ever experience anything through our own senses and perception, and these are specific to an individual.  Through these two books we are given a window onto the beauty and power of the natural world through these writers’ experience of it."
Why being a POC Author Sucks sometimes
"I am a person of color, a minority, and I am a published author. Did it feel like it was harder for me than a caucasian author to get published? I can't answer that. I have no idea what their path to publication felt like. But I can talk about my own path and the roadblocks that I came across. I can talk about being told over and over again by other writers and publishing professionals that no one would buy a book about ancient Korea. I can talk about having my writing ridiculed by saying it reads like a bad translation of a Chinese book, even though English is my native language, and I'm not Chinese. I have numerous tales of the type of dissuading I endured, but I didn't give up because I believed that there needed to be more books like mine out there. And I was extremely lucky to get published by a wonderful publisher."

Government has failed on library closures, says children's laureate
"Libraries are the best literacy resource we have," she said. "For children, they provide an equaliser that allows everyone the access to books, storytelling sessions, homework clubs, expert librarians who provide non-partisan assistance and advice regarding books and warm and safe environments within which to discover and explore the world of literature. Libraries switch children on to a love of reading, with all the ensuing benefits, and can make them lifelong readers. Without them, literacy may increasingly become the province of the lucky few, rather than the birth right of everyone."

Interview with Lionel Shriver
 "One of the bizarre things about recent times and this whole phenomenon of "most fiction readers are women" is that we have somehow flipped that around to being insulting to women. "Oh, those women, they just have a bunch of time on their hands?" In the olden days, literature was a man's pursuit, and women shouldn't worry their pretty little heads about it. It was about serious, philosophical issues and grand drama, and literature was a man's world and a man's concern. And now that it is a woman's world and a woman's concern, it's considered kind of pathetic. Nobody in publishing ever says that, but there is definitely an element of condescension going on here."


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