A.L. Kennedy – författare

The stories collected in Original Bliss are concerned, appropriately, with the complexities of sex and the lack of it. In the long novella that gives the book its title, Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God - but it is simply love that she's missing. She can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr Brindle, but will she find it in Stuttgart when she meets the enigmatic Edward E. Gluck, with his Process and his paraphernalia? And what happens when her father confessor starts to confess? A beautiful and terrifying examination of passion and pornography, of the aching need for completion and healing.

The heroes and heroines of Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, A. L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death... and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too.Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget...

After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books – it’s just a wonder she’s found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line – urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian – and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors.Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice, writers’ workshops and writers’ health and the book ends with the transcript of Kennedy’s celebrated one-person show about writing and language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class imaginable from one of the finest – and most humane – writers in our language.

The dazzling new collection from the Costa Prize-winning author of Day and The Blue Book.She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best.A husband and wife wait for a train as their relationship unspools silently around them. A woman contemplates the idea of her lover dying as she queues in a bank. An almost impossibly uncomfortably lunch culminates in a passionate kiss. In this dazzling collection of stories lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered somehow emerge – haltingly, awkwardly – into the astonishment of intimacy.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEJon is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work, he is a good man in a bad world. Meg is a bankrupt accountant – two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. Living on Telegraph Hill, she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety.As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London – passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever – they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.

The stories collected in Original Bliss are concerned, appropriately, with the complexities of sex and the lack of it. In the long novella that gives the book its title, Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God - but it is simply love that she's missing. She can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr Brindle, but will she find it in Stuttgart when she meets the enigmatic Edward E. Gluck, with his Process and his paraphernalia? And what happens when her father confessor starts to confess? A beautiful and terrifying examination of passion and pornography, of the aching need for completion and healing.

Bullfighting - the ultimate spectator sport.Acclaimed novelist A. L. Kennedy unpeels the layers and explains the mechanics before dissecting them with surgical precision. Beyond the theatre, the costume and the well-worn plot she focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on. The result is a startling confrontation with her own, and mankind's, mortality.

The world's fascination with New Orleans stems from the allure of the music of the city—music that owes its origins and development to many sources. Until now, popular and scholarly books, dissertations, and articles that attempt to explain these sources have failed to recognize the unsung heroes of the New Orleans jazz scene: the teachers in its public schools. Through more than 90 original interviews and extensive research in New Orleans' historical collections, Dr. Kennedy documents ways that public school teachers pushed an often unwilling urban institution to become an important structure that transmitted jazz and the other musical traditions of the city to future musicians.Music legends from Louis Armstrong to Ellis Marsalis Jr.—who also provides the foreword—are just two of the many well-known former students of the New Orleans public schools. Chord Changes on the Chalkboard shows that, particularly after the 1920s, public school students benefited not only from the study of instrumental music and theory, but also from direct exposure to musicians, many of whom were invited to perform for the students. The impact the teachers had on generations of musicians and music fans is undeniable, yet their teaching techniques are only part of the story. In addition to the successes enjoyed with their students, the teachers' own musical experiences, recordings, and performances are also examined. The interaction between teachers and students in New Orleans public school classrooms opens a new field of research for music historians, and this book is the first to document ways in which public school teachers acted as mentors to shape the future of jazz and the music of New Orleans. An important addition to its field, Chord Changes on a Chalkboard will provide invaluable information for jazz fans and historians, music scholars and students, and it is also useful reading for any public school teacher. A must for any music library, it should also be a welcome addition to any collection supporting A

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too.Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget...

Bullfighting - the ultimate spectator sport.Acclaimed novelist A. L. Kennedy unpeels the layers and explains the mechanics before dissecting them with surgical precision. Beyond the theatre, the costume and the well-worn plot she focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on. The result is a startling confrontation with her own, and mankind's, mortality.

The heroes and heroines of Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, A. L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death... and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing - the unassuagable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love. Its characters' lives are thwarted, dashed, impassioned, each in their own way immolated by hope. A queue outside a cheese shop leads to a thrilling infidelity; a crematorium funeral exposes a love gone sour; a foreign hotel room becomes a diorama of despair as physical sickness becomes a metaphor for incurable grief. In the title story, two lovers confront their lusts amid the ruins of Rome; in 'A Bad Son' a young boy from a damaged home searches for some kind of peace in the newly fallen snow.

Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to notice that her lifestyle is not entirely sustainable: her subconscious is turning against her, her soul is a little unwell. Her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is not as reliable as it once was and her drinking is frankly out of hand. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of the problem she must cure. From the north-east of Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state: the one where she can be happy - her paradise. Paradise is a compelling examination of failure that is also a comic triumph, a novel of dark extremes that is full of the most ravishing lyrical beauty.

A.L. Kennedy's fifth collection of short stories show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. Her characters are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger or who order a luxurious meal as their lives fall apart - but the stories she weaves around them are truly remarkable.She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption and the love - and she does so with enormous human compassion and leaps of black humour.From the winner of the Costa Book Award for Day.

Mary Margaret Hamilton was educated in Scotland. She was born there too. These may not have been the best possible options, but they were the only ones on offer at the time. Although her father did his best, her knowledge of life is perhaps a little incomplete. Margaret knows the best way to look at the moon, how to wake on time and how to breathe fire. Now she must learn how to live. A. L. Kennedy's absorbing, moving and gently political first novel dissects the intricate difficulties of human relationships, from Margaret's passionate attachment to her father and her more problematic involvement with Colin, her lover, to the wider social relations between pupil and teacher, employer and employee, individual and state.

Jennifer M. Wilson has decided to become a voice. A professional enunciator, an announcer, a voice-over artist, she has retreated into a world of words. Behind the sound-proof double doors of the recording studio she must surely be safe from the painful inconveniences of hate and love. Until reality breaks in and Jennifer uncovers the harsh vocabulary of addiction and the addictive extremes of sex. -An alchemical romance, a Swiftian satire for our times, an impossible spiritual journey and a devastating plummet into insanity and perversion, So I Am Glad is oblique, incisive, hilarious and horrific.

Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, A.L. Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

Nathan Staples is consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion for his estranged wife and their teenage daughter, Mary. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possiblity of telling her he is her father, and becoming whole and complete and alive again.

You are crossing the Atlantic on a liner with your boyfriend who may or may not be planning to propose.You are fleeing the past - your ex-lover Arthur, the man who helped you dupe the vulnerable into believing loved ones were trying to make contact from beyond the grave. But there's a secret you've kept from Arthur, a deception about the two of you that threatens to emerge when you discover Arthur's presence on the boat.

After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books – it’s just a wonder she’s found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line – urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian – and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors.Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice, writers’ workshops and writers’ health and the book ends with the transcript of Kennedy’s celebrated one-person show about writing and language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class imaginable from one of the finest – and most humane – writers in our language.

Something odd is going on at the Fetch Brothers Golf Spa Hotel. Receptionist Bryony Mailer has noticed a definite tendency towards disappearance amongst the guests. She’s tried talking to the manager, she’s even tried talking to the owner who lives in one of the best cottages in the grounds, but to no avail. And then a tall, loping remarkably energetic guest (wearing a fetching scarf and floppy hat) appears. The Fourth Doctor thinks he’s in Chicago. He knows he’s in 1978. And he also knows that if he doesn’t do something very clever very soon, matters will get very, very out of hand.

Time Trips is a unique and beautifully illustrated collection of Doctor Who adventures from bestselling and award-winning writers including Joanne Harris, Trudi Canavan, Nick Harkaway, A.L. Kennedy and more. Taking you from ancient Alexandria to nameless planets in the far future, these tales are at turns funny, frightening, moving and thought-provoking – short stories that are bigger on the inside.Time Trips includes:The Anti-Hero (featuring the Second Doctor) by Stella Duffy Salt of the Earth (featuring the Third Doctor) by Trudi CanavanThe Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller (featuring the Third Doctor) by Joanne HarrisThe Death Pit (featuring the Fourth Doctor) by A.L. KennedyA Handful of Stardust (featuring the Sixth Doctor) by Jake ArnottThe Bog Warrior (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Cecelia AhernKeeping Up with the Joneses (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Nick HarkawayInto the Nowhere (featuring the Eleventh Doctor) by Jenny T. Colgan

Isn’t life terrible? Isn’t it all going to end in tears? Won’t it be good to just give up and let something else run my mind, my life?Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word.Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers' Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up…

The dazzling new collection from the Costa Prize-winning author of Day and The Blue Book.She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best.A husband and wife wait for a train as their relationship unspools silently around them. A woman contemplates the idea of her lover dying as she queues in a bank. An almost impossibly uncomfortably lunch culminates in a passionate kiss. In this dazzling collection of stories lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered somehow emerge – haltingly, awkwardly – into the astonishment of intimacy.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEJon is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work, he is a good man in a bad world. Meg is a bankrupt accountant – two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. Living on Telegraph Hill, she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety.As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London – passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever – they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.

The world''s fascination with New Orleans stems from the allure of the music of the city-music that owes its origins and development to many sources. Until now, popular and scholarly books, dissertations, and articles that attempt to explain these sources have failed to recognize the unsung heroes of the New Orleans jazz scene: the teachers in its public schools. Through more than 90 original interviews and extensive research in New Orleans'' historical collections, Dr. Kennedy documents ways that public school teachers pushed an often unwilling urban institution to become an important structure that transmitted jazz and the other musical traditions of the city to future musicians.Music legends from Louis Armstrong to Ellis Marsalis Jr.-who also provides the foreword-are just two of the many well-known former students of the New Orleans public schools. Chord Changes on the Chalkboard shows that, particularly after the 1920s, public school students benefited not only from the study of instrumental music and theory, but also from direct exposure to musicians, many of whom were invited to perform for the students. The impact the teachers had on generations of musicians and music fans is undeniable, yet their teaching techniques are only part of the story. In addition to the successes enjoyed with their students, the teachers'' own musical experiences, recordings, and performances are also examined. The interaction between teachers and students in New Orleans public school classrooms opens a new field of research for music historians, and this book is the first to document ways in which public school teachers acted as mentors to shape the future of jazz and the music of New Orleans. An important addition to its field, Chord Changes on a Chalkboard will provide invaluable information for jazz fans and historians, music scholars and students, and it is also useful reading for any public school teacher. A must for any music library, it should also be a welcome addition to any collection supporting A

'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday TimesHumour, fantasy, rage and despair both help and hinder the protagonists of these stories as they navigate changing circumstances, accumulating losses, moments of comprehension and tenderness. Here is the woman, hoping for a quiet day at the zoo, who finally snaps at a white man's racist tirade and vents years of fury; the micro-celebrity who practises lines for a chat show on which he'll never appear; and the woman who walks out of her honeymoon suite at midnight, perhaps for good. Unsparing in her close examination of human relationships, A. L. Kennedy proves once again why she is regarded as one of our great storytellers.'Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thoughts... Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear-cut and yet capable of great tenderness' Observer'An author with a proven ability to see - truly see - and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page' New Statesman