Blog: Writers in Residence

Rachel Malik on Horne’s Guide to Whitby and Dracula

19 April 2018

Rachel Malik on Horne’s Guide to Whitby and Dracula

A few of the many things I loved about my stay:

The rook convention outside the library; window sills so wide you can organise your life on them; the giant woodpigeons; the mushroom quiche; that there is a book called The Best Books which Gladstone wrote his name in (some things seemed simpler in the late 19th Century); treacle tart; that I thought a lot, read a lot and wrote quite a lot. That I worked out on the last day my villain’s bad, bad secret. Guilty pleasure: watching both series of The Hour again in the evenings. I love Romola Garai.

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Interview: Emma Rees on Taming Shakespeare

7 March 2018

Interview: Emma Rees on Taming Shakespeare

Emma Rees was Gladstone’s Library’s Political Writer in Residence in 2016 and returns to Hawarden on Friday, 11th May to lead a two-day residential course on reading Shakespeare without fear. 

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Christmas reading recommends from the Gladstone's Library team!

15 December 2017

Christmas reading recommends from the Gladstone's Library team!

Gifting the perfect book to a person is one of the great joys of life; creating a perfect partnership which you can just feel in your bones will last.

With that in mind and as a little Christmas treat, the Gladstone’s Library team have gathered together some of our books of the year and reading recommends perfect for stockings. If you are still looking for that perfect gift for someone special, we hope you can find inspiration within this guide! 

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Hearth interview: Krishan Coupland

20 October 2017

Hearth interview: Krishan Coupland

Krishan Coupland is a writer, editor and digital nomad. His debut collection of (very) short fiction, When You Lived Inside the Walls, was published by Stonewood Press in 2017. Other poems and stories have been published in Ambit, Aesthetica, Litro and elsewhere. In his spare time Krishan runs and edits Neon Literary Magazine. 

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On rhythm by Penny Boxall

31 August 2017

On rhythm by Penny Boxall

‘…Eyes like [what?] and [something] splinters:

A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.’

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Breaking the silence by Caroline Shenton

17 August 2017

Breaking the silence by Caroline Shenton

‘At last, my friends’, Gladstone told the electors of South Lancashire in July 1865, ‘I am come amongst you. And I am come…unmuzzled.’

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Key Strokes: Writer as Swimmer by William Atkins

27 February 2017

Key Strokes: Writer as Swimmer by William Atkins

I’ve always been interested in the relationship between the work of the mind and that of the body, how one can influence the other, and the extent to which the physical overlaps with the mental: How the reservoir of one kind of energy seeps into or draws upon the other.

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Gladfest interview: Ian Parks

2 August 2016

Gladfest interview: Ian Parks

Ian Parks was one of the first Writers in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2012. His collections of poems include Shell Island, The Landing Stage, Love Poems 1979-2009, and The Exile’s House. He is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry and was Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester from 2012 – 2014.

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Entertaining Judgment: An interview with Greg Garrett

15 July 2016

Entertaining Judgment: An interview with Greg Garrett

On 22nd -24th July, author and Professor at Baylor University Texas, Greg Garrett leads a course at Gladstone’s Library exploring depictions of the afterlife in contemporary film, music and literature. The course is entitled Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination and follows Greg’s book of the same name…

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Stronger Together by Emma Rees

24 June 2016

Stronger Together by Emma Rees

Last weekend I ran a workshop for around 20 people as part of my writing residency at Gladstone’s Library. I arrived a week earlier, on the Sunday when the news was breaking about the brutal murders of dozens of people at Pulse, an LGBTQI nightclub in Orlando. On Thursday, as the ghastly news from America had only just begun to soak into the fabric of the world’s narrative palimpsest, I was writing at my desk when I heard about the murder of Jo Cox on the streets of West Yorkshire. That same day, I read, Boko Haram had shot dead 18 women who were attending a funeral in Kudu, Nigeria. The news reports on all three cases, and the Twitter updates and Facebook posts about them, combined to have the effect of making the world – already a dangerous place – feel somehow more urgently precarious.

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