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Rejection and Acceptance

This is a photo of me back in 2005, when I was twenty-seven years old. I had finished writing my first book, The Poet's Wife (which I called In the Shade of the Orange Tree - this was later changed by the publisher) and my then-boyfriend-now-husband,…
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Yours Sincerely: The Climate Letters

Over the summer, a wonderful poet called Linda France did a call out entitled 'Yours Sincerely: The Climate Letters.' This was an invitation to use our pens and imaginations and continue the powerful work that words can bring to the ongoing…
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Publication of new book: The Sky Within - A Memoir of Sleep

My fourth book (and first non-fiction offering), winner of the Backlash Press prize for non-fiction, has been published! It's not very easy to describe how it makes me feel to finally see this book in print. I've been working on it physically…
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Taking a 'Tech Shabbat' each Sunday

For a few months now, my family and I have been putting our screens away from Saturday to Sunday evening. Everything goes into a locked box (yes, laptops, phones, i-pads, all of it) and I place the key in a hidden place in case it feels too…
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How to Grow a Library

A couple of years after moving with my family to Nairobi (where we lived between 2013 and 2017), I started thinking about the fact that the school my children attended didn't have a library and I felt unhappy about this. A reading culture in…
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I realise that I'm pretty good at telling myself - and other people - carefully crafted stories that have endured over a long period of time; stories that I've never thought to question. In my non-fiction book coming out later this year…
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Write to Travel

In my previous blog, I penned a few thoughts around the curbing of my incessant travel habit. As I was writing it, I considered a poetry competition I entered last year with Trip Fiction (a brilliant online resource pairing books with travel).…

This is not an easy blog post to write

✰ Caveat - Before anyone reads a word of this, the following blog is not intended to make anybody feel guilty. Guilt is such a counter-productive, ungenerous emotion. It leaves no space for change, for reflection, for openness. Everybody…
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An Icelandic Flood of Books

It was only a couple of years ago that I first heard about Iceland's Christmas tradition of Jólabókaflóð, roughly translated to 'Christmas Book Flood.' On Christmas Eve each year, Icelanders cosy up in front of the fire, drink…
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May I touch your hair?

I recently read a book by Aja Barber called Consumed which caused me to take a long, hard look at the clothes I wear, their provenance, and how the clothing industry is helping to fuel the climate crisis. I've really never been into fashion…