As our judging panel prepare to begin their search for this year’s Stories Competition winner, we catch up with two of the judges, best-selling authors Monica Ali and Beth O’Leary
I dreamed of writing a book here’s how I did it and you can too Phoebe Luckhurst
Last April, as ambulance after ambulance made high-speed slaloms down my south London street and the Government’s evening briefings increasingly acquired the ghoulish unreality of nightmare, I survived by creating an imaginary world, and retreating into it.
I started writing my novel The Lock In over the Easter weekend, in the first throes of lockdown 1.0, when the quiet and the isolation were both new and already felt like they had always been. I finished writing it about eight weeks later, in mid-June, just as the world started tentatively to open up (well, for the first, fateful time). And so the book will forever remind me of the strangest of days in more ways than one, since the idea for the novel actually spun out of my experience locking down with my boyfriend in our flat when we both had coronavirus last March, and spent a sweaty week managing our sky-rocketing temper