Kate Pullinger – författare

On Platform One of Paddington Station in London, there is a statue of an unknown soldier; he’s reading a letter. On the hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war everyone in the country was invited to take a moment and write that letter. A selection of those letters are published here, in a new kind of war memorial – one made only of words.In a year of public commemoration `Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ invited everyone to step back from the public ceremonies and take a few private moments to think. Providing a space for people to reconsider the familiar imagery we associate with the war memorials – cenotaphs, poppies, and silence – it asked the following questions: if you could say what you want to say about that war, with all we’ve learned since 1914, with all your own experience of life and death to hand, what would you say? If you were able to send a personal message to this soldier, a man who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write?The response was extraordinary. The invitation was to everyone and, indeed, all sorts of people responded: schoolchildren, pensioners, students, artists, nurses, serving members of the forces and even the Prime Minister. Letters arrived from all over the United Kingdom and beyond, and many well-known writers and personalities contributed.Opening on 28th June 2014, the centenary of the Sarajevo assassinations, and closing at 11 pm on the night of 4 August 2014, the centenary of the moment when Prime Minister Asquith announced to the House of Commons that Britain had joined the First World War, this book offers a snapshot of what people in this country and across the world were thinking and feeling about the centenary of World War One.

On Platform One of Paddington Station in London, there is a statue of an unknown soldier; he’s reading a letter. On the hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war everyone in the country was invited to take a moment and write that letter. A selection of those letters are published here, in a new kind of war memorial – one made only of words.In a year of public commemoration ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ invited everyone to step back from the public ceremonies and take a few private moments to think. Providing a space for people to reconsider the familiar imagery we associate with the war memorials – cenotaphs, poppies, and silence – it asked the following questions: if you could say what you want to say about that war, with all we’ve learned since 1914, with all your own experience of life and death to hand, what would you say? If you were able to send a personal message to this soldier, a man who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write?The response was extraordinary. The invitation was to everyone and, indeed, all sorts of people responded: schoolchildren, pensioners, students, artists, nurses, serving members of the forces and even the Prime Minister. Letters arrived from all over the United Kingdom and beyond, and many well-known writers and personalities contributed.Opening on 28th June 2014, the centenary of the Sarajevo assassinations, and closing at 11 pm on the night of 4 August 2014, the centenary of the moment when Prime Minister Asquith announced to the House of Commons that Britain had joined the First World War, this book offers a snapshot of what people in this country and across the world were thinking and feeling about the centenary of World War One.

_______________The novelization of the stunning film starring Holly Hunter, winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay_______________Ada, together with her nine-year-old illegitimate daughter Flora, and her piano, leave Scotland to arrive in the remote bush of 19th-century New Zealand for a marriage arranged by her father. Although mute, she does not consider herself silent, as her piano is the vehicle of her expression . . . In her award-winning film The Piano, Jane Campion told a love story so stunningly original that it transfixed millions of film-goers all over the world. Although she had already spent ten years writing and making the film, Campion continued to be haunted by her characters and decided to tell the whole story.Delving deeply into the characters' pasts, the novel reveals why Ada has stopped speaking, the history of the piano, and the secret of Flora's conception. We also find out about Baines's mysterious past, and discover what lies behind Stewart's stark loneliness.

When the first Asham Award was launched in 1996 - in honour of Asham House, the house in Sussex where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived - nearly a thousand unknown women writers took part. This is the first anthology of winning stories, published a year later and entitled "The Catch", demonstrated not only the rich cultural mix of our society today, but the huge range of largely untapped talent in towns and villages across the UK. The second and third collections were equally successful, and this fourth collection promises to be even better, with, once again, over one thousand entries to this year's competition and commissioned stories from Lesley Glaister, Liz Jensen, Francine Stock, Kamila Shamsie, Erica Wagner and Maggie O'Farrell, among others. "Shoe Fly Baby" is a collection of stories that successfully blends the work of established writers with new authors - and taken together represents the very best of contemporary short story writing.

'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world' Virginia Woolf Our world has been conjured by the talented writers collected here. These wonderful and evocative stories have a truly international flavour, taking us from icy Alaska to the burnt outback of Australia, and include tales of murder, loss of innocence, revenge, heroism and hope. This vibrant collection contains new stories by Helen Dunmore, Trezza Azzopardi, Helen Simpson, Louise Doughty, Marina Warner and Lynne Truss plus twelve stories from the unpublished writers who were shortlisted for the Asham Short-Story Prize 2005. Asham House in Sussex was once home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf and is the inspiration behind the Asham Award. Launched in 1996 to support and encourage new writers, it is Britain's only prize for short stories by women.

'As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world' Virginia Woolf Asham House in Sussex was once home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf and is the inspiration behind the Asham Award. Launched in 1996 to support and encourage new writers, it is Britain's only prize for short stories by women. Waving at the Gardener presents the twelve fresh, engaging and original voices shortlisted for the Asham Short-Story Award 2009, as well as four specially commissioned new stories by beloved authors Margaret Atwood, Esther Freud, Alison MacLeod and Yiyun Li.

Exploring a host of female parts, rites of passage, love, loss, danger, revelations, strange relationships, the pleasures and pains of growing up female, a fantastic collection of short stories from some of the best women writers today dealing with all aspects of female life from youth to old age.Includes stories from: Hilary Bailey, Sally Cameron, Betzy Dinesen, Souad Faress, Chrissie Gittins, Bonnie Greer, Vicky Grut, Kirsty Gunn, Brigid Howarth, Mizzy Hussain, Geraldine Kaye, Carolyn Patrick, Ellen Phethean, Kate Pullinger, Stella Rafferty, Ravinder Randhawa, Máire Ní Réagáin, Michéle Roberts, Daphne Rock, Elisa Segrave, Kirsty Seymour-Ure, Susanna Steele & Karen Whiteson.

''As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world'' Virginia WoolfAsham House in Sussex was once home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf and is the inspiration behind the Asham Award. Launched in 1996 to support and encourage new writers, it is Britain''s only prize for short stories by women.Waving at the Gardener presents the twelve fresh, engaging and original voices shortlisted for the Asham Short-Story Award 2009, as well as four specially commissioned new stories by beloved authors Margaret Atwood, Esther Freud, Alison MacLeod and Yiyun Li.

The American debut of an award-winning novel about a lady’s maid’s awakening as she journeys from the confines of Victorian England to the uncharted far reaches of Egypt’s Nile Valley When Lady Duff Gordon, paragon of London society, departs for the hot, dry climate of Egypt to seek relief from her debilitating tuberculosis, her lady’s maid, Sally, doesn’t hesitate to leave the only world she has known in order to remain at her mistress’s side. As Sally gets farther and farther from home, she experiences freedoms she has never known—forgoing corsets and wearing native dress, learning Arabic, and having her first taste of romance. But freedom is a luxury that a lady’s maid can ill afford, and when Sally’s newfound passion for life causes her to forget what she is entitled to, she is brutally reminded she is mistress of nothing. Ultimately she must choose her master and a way back home—or a way to an unknown future. Based on the real lives of Lady Duff Gordon and her maid, The Mistress of Nothing is a lush, erotic, and compelling story about the power of race, class, and love

From the award-winning author of The Mistress of Nothing comes a highly imaginative story of colliding worlds and extraordinary connections, revealing the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together.When everything was falling apart, someone fell into place… Suburban London housewife Harriet spends her days doing what she’s worst at. She grocery shops for her family who eats too much, parents a son who refuses to communicate, and tries to be a wife to a man who hasn’t embraced her in years. But what starts out as a mundane trip to the supermarket turns her world upside down when a mysterious man named Yacub falls out of the sky from the landing gear of an airplane and lands on her car in the parking lot—and survives. He’s starving and freezing cold—what else can she do other than bring him home to her family? Suddenly her son has stepped away from the video games and her husband is looking at her once again—even if it’s because they think she’s crazy for taking in a complete stranger who stinks of gas. And just who is Yacub, this young man who escaped from a Dubai labor camp and stowed away in the belly of the plane to travel around the world? Is it an extraordinary coincidence that he’s dropped into Harriet’s life just as a long-buried secret from her past threatens to come to light? Inspired by real-life accounts of airplane stowaways, Landing Gear showcases the complex texture of modern life, and how we sometimes need help seeing what’s right in front of us.

Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady''s maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd ménage marshalled by the resourceful Omar, which travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor. As Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into weekly salons; language lessons;excursions to the tombs; Sally too adapts to a new world, affording her heady and heartfelt freedoms never known before. But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing.

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.