Zoe Deleuil

  • When I started writing my psychological suspense novel, The Night Village, about a new mother and her strange houseguest, I pictured the story unfolding in my old flat in Hackney. And then, in the same way a dream will suddenly shift location, my characters were all somehow living at the Barbican Estate in central London.

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  • Fremantle Press and WA arts magazine Seesaw are offering four lucky bookworms the chance to win one of their new crime titles including The Night Village. All you need to do is email competitions@seesawmag.com.au with the title of your preferred book in the subject line and your name and phone number in the body of

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  • Recently I wrote a piece for an online writer’s group about how I finally achieved a publishing contract for my novel, The Night Village (out in August). It is easy to see the path to publication in retrospect, and to polish over the missteps and times when it was barely visible, or so cluttered with

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  • The word ‘mischief’ has always summoned up for me an unpleasant memory of being in the stuffy, bureaucratic waiting room of the local teacher’s union with my little sister as my mother went to another room for a meeting. Looking back, I can imagine her reservations about leaving us alone in the waiting room, and

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  • Sylvia Plath lived her short life at break-neck, ravenous speed – she was a star student who went from Smith College to a nervous breakdown to Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar, where she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes, then back to the USA and then to Devon and London where she

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  • Tara June Winch in Berlin

    Recently I listened to author Tara June Winch talk about her Miles Franklin Award winning novel, The Yield. Here are some notes from the evening.

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  • ‘My dad says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through Immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become a Londoner.’

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  • The One Thing

    The One Thing is a New York Times bestselling self-help book, written by Gary Keller. It came out in 2013 and the central idea – that you find and prioritise the One Thing you’re good at – is worth thinking about in 2020, when it’s so easy to despair at so much loss, yet crucial

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  • Writers are always told to read as widely as they can. As a teenager, I devoured books, but thinking back to my endless free time and zippy neurons, I sometimes wish I’d drawn a line. At Flowers in the Attic, perhaps. Anyone who has conversed with a four-year-old will know that a child’s brain is like

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  • Some good news from a while ago – two of my short stories, The Ibis Bedroom Tree and More River, were shortlisted for the 2020 Newcastle Short Story Award 2020, and are now published in their annual anthology. I recorded an excerpt from one of my stories, The Ibis Bedroom Tree, and you can listen

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