The Royal Literary Fund asked me to talk about location and the writer, so I spoke about my daily walks along the river, and how the Thames in London is a constant source of inspiration and renewal. I also give a shout-out to my friend the Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji.
For me, writing is frequently inspired by, certainly informed by, place. And often that place is London. It’s not so much about always looking for the next great location, as being open to a great location finding me. The closure of an East-End mini-cab office was part of the inspiration for my novel Foxy-T. While the ‘Paint Frame’, a scene painting studio backstage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, became the crime scene in my detective novel The Fountain in the Forest.
But it’s not only major factors like ‘setting’ that can be inspired by particular places. Locations can also provide a different kind of creative sustenance, a vital resource in the craft and nitty-gritty of writing.
I’m currently an RLF Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, and looking forward to being back on campus in a couple of weeks, where my role is to offer free and confidential writing advice to anyone in the Royal Holloway community that asks for it. Visit the RLF website to find out more about the important work they do to support writing and writers.
Join us for an evening with trail-blazing contemporary artist, Liliane Lijn, whose seminal kinetic artworks redefined the possibilities of creative and artistic expression. From her motorised Poem Machines of the early 1960s that infused language with additional meaning through movement, to her iconic spinning Koans and mesmerising masterwork, Liquid Reflections, Lijn merged industrial materials, movement, myth, and poetry in ways that were decades ahead of their time. Currently the subject of a major retrospective at Tate St Ives—Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive—Lijn will be at The Minories to discuss her acclaimed new memoir, Liquid Reflections, with author Tony White. Based on her diaries from 1958 to 1966, the book charts her formative years in bohemian Paris and Athens, her fearless experiments with new materials, and her navigation of love, motherhood, and an art world deeply resistant to women. Critics have hailed it as “utterly gripping, enraging, entertaining—and important” (Jennifer Higgie) and a portrait of “a unique and self-renewing force of creativity for six decades” (Marina Warner).
I first met Liliane when I worked at the national office of Arts Council England in the mid-00s, and in 2006 I published a short non-fiction piece by Liliane (for the Arts Council) that had resulted from her residency at the NASA Space Science Labs at UC Berkeley entitled ‘The Language of Invisible Worlds’, which you can read more about here… (and download directly here).
Then in 2010 I published Atomanotes, an artist’s book by Liliane, on Piece of Paper Press. Since then we have shared events variously at the Horse Hospital and October Gallery, London.
Regular readers will know that I occasionally write reviews for the Guardian and elsewhere. I will also post book reviews here from time to time…
Hazell Ward’s audacious debut opens in a self-consciously metafictional style reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, with the reader’s arrival at a Murder Mystery Party. ‘Tap lightly on the door,’ we are told. ‘They are expecting you.’
The venue is the London home of the Verreman family, scene of a still notorious murder-cum-cold case: ‘the Verreman affair’, in which professional gambler John Verreman, the 7th Earl De Verre, AKA ‘Lord Verreman’, brutally murdered the family’s nanny then attempted to kill his wife, before disappearing off the face of the Earth. If this sounds familiar, Ward’s fictional case aligns closely with the murderous circumstances associated with the 1974 disappearance of Lord Lucan, although with at least one significant difference: the fictional Verremans have only one child, David. The thirteen guests waiting with the now grown-up David in the Verreman’s large living room, are all the principal witnesses from the original (fictional) case: friends and family, coroner, blood expert, policeman, publican, etc. All of whom share names with a pantheon of legendary detective writers: Cameron McCabe, Elizabeth Mackintosh, Ronald Knox, and Nicholas Blake among them. This being a closed circle mystery, they are also – of course – suspects.
Led by David Verreman, the guests begin to piece together a familiar sequence of events: the Verremans’ separation, his financial troubles, his lying in wait in the dark for his wife but killing the nanny by mistake, his powerful friends, and so on. Initially everyone’s assumptions are confirmed – ‘Guilty!’ – but with each retelling the story starts to unravel.
The reader is first led to suppose that we are here to solve the case, but in Act 2, the ‘real’ detective appears: Max Enygma, private eye and ex-cop, who appears to have been taken prisoner by David Verreman. The Game is Murder might be inspired by a horrifying and unreachable true-crime, but as Ward reminds us, ‘Even if, heaven forbid, a novel should be based on . . . real events, the story which is captive inside the pages of the book is always fictional.’
Ward’s prose skips surefootedly between straight narrative and metafictional aside, type-written contracts, witness statements, memory games, and multiple-choice questionnaires; all punctuated by continual bickering between David Verreman and his imaginary sibling, ‘Daniel’.
Wrexham Library
Speaking at the novel’s UK launch at Wrexham Library, Ward spoke eloquently and movingly about her childhood reading, the influence of her mother’s love of detective novels, and her own longstanding interest in the history and form of the whodunnit as a literary game; an interest she had further explored while doing a creative writing MA, then PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. She also discussed the influence on her writing of Hunter S Thompson’s gonzo style, in particular its capacity for surrealism. Transport this approach to a Belgravia town house in class-ridden early-seventies Britain, and Ward’s willingness to use surreal and dreamlike imagery invokes some interesting allies. For example, David’s multiple personalities – born of his childhood trauma, and ventriloquising in turn each of the key witnesses – bring a pleasing echo of Alec Guinness’s manyfold parts in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Shades of this gently insolent vein of class-conscious British cinematic surrealism continue in Act 3, when the Belgravia basement murder scene is transformed into a courtroom, recalling the celestial trial sequences in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946).
Ward won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Short Story Dagger in 2023, for ‘Cast a Long Shadow’, in the eponymous anthology edited by Katherine Stansfield and Caroline Oakley (Honno, 2022). What’s additionally so enthralling about The Game is Murder is the fearlessness with which she uses her encyclopaedic knowledge of the conventions and history of detective fiction to challenge received wisdoms about the ultimate unsolved case via her own fictional proxies, with precise storytelling nous. It makes for an exhilarating, playful read: bold, propulsive, and uncanny.
With its clever pitting of reader against author and narrator, and Enygma’s mistrust of accepted accounts, Ward’s approach goes beyond Golden Age nostalgia to find a sharper edge, in places reminiscent of Marguerite Duras: ‘“What we need to discover,”’ says Enygma at one point, ‘“are the questions that were not asked.”’ In so doing, and by focusing in on her murder victim, the nanny Sally Gardner, ‘A woman who had a life as valuable as that of any titled lord or lady’, Ward’s novel carefully illuminates class and confirmation biases in the original (historical and fictional) investigations, before introducing a compelling alternative theory. Developing the notion that myths about criminal motivation gain legitimacy in inverse proportion to lack of evidence, Hazell Ward’s ingenious dénouement sees Max Enygma reach a shocking yet plausible conclusion that would satisfy any Agatha Christie fan.
ICYMI here’s a clipping of John Williams’ Time Out review of my novel Charlieunclenorfolktango (Codex, 1999) – I seem to remember that the review sections of UK listings magazines responded particularly favourably to the novel.
It was fun to join eight other authors at the Bread and Roses Theatre in Clapham, London, yesterday – one of many pub-theatres in the capital – for our National Crime Reading Month gig. ICYMI National Crime Reading Month is a joint promotion by The Crime Writers’ Association and The Reading Agency that runs through June each year. Thanks to author Anne Coates for sending this photo of my reading!
The welcome was warm, but the weather was in the low-mid 30s (°C). I read from something new, talked a little about The Fountain in the Forest and its follow-up, about the challenges and necessities of writing fiction set in a contemporary law-enforcement environment, and about the Guardian Quick Crosswords that I’d do every day in 1985 and returning to them as source-material now.
Interesting trivia: apparently the Bread and Roses is the only London pub to be owned by a trade union! Well, I guess the clue is in the name. And this beauty was blooming in a garden opposite.
It was a great pleasure and privilege to perform in Flanders House, London (part of the Belgian Embassy in the UK), alongside poets from Belgium and the UK, for the European Poetry Festival, curated by Steven J Fowler.
I’m not a poet, but my contribution (celebrating speech in a spirit of European exchange) was a performance remix of Thomas Shelton’s first English translation of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, the first modern European novel. This was presented as a live improvised collaboration with avant-garde musician Benedict Taylor. As part of last night’s mixed bill, we could only present the first seven minutes of the work – the whole thing might last considerably longer.
Tony White (L) and Benedict Taylor, Flanders House, London, 19 June 2025 (photo: Eleanor Wilders)
In fact Shelton’s translation (undertaken in 1607, as a favour for a friend who couldn’t read Spanish, and then published in London in 1612, and with the second part of the novel in 1620) was the first translation of ‘The Quixote’ into ANY language. It also turns out to have had a particular and very significant connection with Belgium… So it was a thrill to bring it home last night.
Steven J Fowler the curator of the European Poetry Festival filmed us from the front row – thank you to Steven, project supporters, the superb audience, and the Embassy team at Flanders House for all their hard work and hospitality.
The event opened with solo readings by Lies Gallez, Tijl Nuyts and Astrid Haerens, followed by new collaborations featuring: Lies Gallez and Mischa Foster Poole / Astrid Haerens and Mark Waldron / Tijl Nuyts and James Wilkes / Tony White and Benedict Taylor / Sinnead Singson and Regina Avendano / Bella Weerasinghe and Caitlin Nugent / Victor Rees and Iarla Prendergast Knight. And here’s the group shot! You can see more videos and photos of the whole event here…
Photo: Eleanor Wilders
EPF Flanders was generously supported by Flanders Literature and The Embassy of Belgium: Delegation of Flanders. Curated by SJ Fowler with thanks to Patrick Peeters.
I’m sad to write that my seventh novel Phantom at the Feast – the follow-up to The Fountain in the Forest – won’t now be published in November 2025 as planned. We had to end the publishing agreement with Unbound/Boundless for Phantom at The Feast owing to breach of contract due to non-payment of the signature and delivery advances. It hurts. I’ve lost time, and money I was counting on. But all rights are now back with me – which is a huge relief.
It’s always a great leap of faith when a novel goes out on submission to publishers, particularly since Phantom at the Feast marks the completion of a ten-year project. So it was a thrill to get a great deal very quickly, and to start making exciting plans with an editor I admire. I’m gutted that it’s not to be, but acutely aware that I’m fortunate compared with author and industry colleagues who’ve lost much larger sums. My heart goes out to them, and to everyone affected.
Sincere thanks to those who’ve posted, liked, or messaged in recent months to say how much you’re looking forward to reading the follow-up to The Fountain in the Forest. To everyone that jumped on board with Phantom at the Feast, who offered an advance quote, or got in touch to line up interviews or share events – thank you. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to pick up these conversations again before too long.
A. From a forthcoming novel: The Battle of Orgreave considered as a descent into Hell after Botticelli…
Read the whole interview here!
It was a great pleasure (virtually, at least) to visit the Tregolls Lodge Book Club in Truro, Cornwall, a few months back. Book groups and book clubs are important to their members, to authors, and to the book industry more widely. It’s always a great pleasure to hear that a book club has been reading one of my novels, and even sometimes to get feedback from them, or – more rarely – an invitation to visit. This one had been in the diary for a while, so it was great to finally meet. Thanks all for your hospitality and great chat! Howard and Jeannie who run the book club also publish a monthly newsletter compilation of interviews with visiting authors, which since we’ve been in touch I have read with interest (and always learn something from other writers). Then it was my turn.
This interview was published in Tregolls 1 October newsletter last year. I’ve been meaning to share it… The interview was actually done the year before that in June ’23, when we were first in contact, but most of the answers still hold – except very sadly my answer to the question about mascot/avatar/spirit animal): beloved Popsy is no longer with us.
I’ll be presenting a new improvised collaboration with musician and composer Benedict Taylor, as part of Flanders Poetry Night. Three Flemish poets visit London to present brand new collaborations made with British counterparts, just for this special night of ‘Camarade’ collaborative poetry. Celebrating the remarkable contemporary Flemish literary scene and exploring both literary and experimental poetry, this event is held in the beautiful environs of Flanders House, in the heart of London.
The event will open with solo readings by Lies Gallez, Tijl Nuyts and Astrid Haerens, followed by new collaborations featuring: Tony White and Benedict Taylor, Lies Gallez and Mischa Foster Poole, Astrid Haerens and Mark Waldron, Tijl Nuyts and James Wilkes, Elif Duygu and Eleanor Wilders. Flanders house, 1A Cavendish Square. London. W1G 0LD – Free, but booking essential. More info and tickets…
Piece of Paper Press & tonywhite.london 
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