Words on a Page

The past few months have been filled with activities revolving around the Portsmouth Authors Collective - all of which have have required lots of time and energy and organisation - things that are in short supply in my world. Hence, it 's been a shameful length of time since I posted my last author interview.   Forgive me. * The Portsmouth Authors Collective   seeks to put the spotlight on local talent who live in and/or take inspiration from the city and its surrounding areas. I was thrilled, therefore, to be asked to interview Richard Salsbury a couple of months ago at the launch of his debut novel Mute . Here, we reprise that interview for this blog and for the PAC website .    Author Bio: Richard Salsbury is a novelist and award-winning short story writer based in the south of England. His work has appeared in Artificium , Flash Fiction Magazine , World Wide Writers , Portsmouth News , the FairlightBooks website and on BBC Radio. He is an editor and websit...

The Portsmouth Authors Collective  was created to promote the work of the city’s current crop of authors, and this series of interviews offers a glimpse into the work their doing and their writing lives. This time around I'm speaking the the thriller writer Christine Lawrence. Author Bio: Christine Lawrence is an ex-psychiatric nurse turned author and spoken word performer whose fiction draws on real life experiences and local settings. She was one of the BookFest 2012 ‘ Writers to Watch ’ . Since then, her shorter fiction has been featured in a variety of local anthologies and projects including  Portsmouth Fairy Tales for Grown Ups , the Writing Edward King project, the transmedia event  Cursed City Dark Tide , and  Pompey Writes: the Best of Star & Crescent . In 2021, she facilitated a series of writing workshops as part of the Libraries Connected/BBC project, ‘Novels that shaped the world’ . A creative writing tutor, she is passi...

  Portsmouth and its environs have inspired an impressive number of well-known writers over the years, and the area continues to be a hub of creative activity for writers of every persuasion.  The Portsmouth Authors Collective was created to promote the work of the city’s current crop of authors, and this series of interviews offers a glimpse into what they're doing. Author Bio: Helen Salsbury’s debut novel, Sometimes When I Sleep , was published in 2021. Her fiction has been published in anthologies, and shortlisted and longlisted for a number of prizes, including the Mslexia novel competition. She’s a trained community journalist and the founder of the environmental writing platform Pens of the Earth . ~ Loree: We’ve known each other for a number of years now, and have exchanged feedback on our WIPs from time to time, but I don’t know a great deal about your journey as a fiction writer. When did you begin writing stories? Helen: I have a box in the attic of the st...