CLARE FLYNN

I’m going to take you to some of the places that feature in UNDER A SOUTHERN SKY. Welcome to Sydney in 1942.

I thought it might be interesting to recreate the routes taken independently and together by Norton and Stella in The Star of Ceylon.

Clare Flynn discusses the research she undertook when writing her novel The Star of Ceylon, and gives her tips for historical research

I'm delighted to welcome my good friend, writer and creative writing teacher/coach/editor, Lorna Fergusson, to the blog to talk about the location of her new short story collection and why she chose to write about visitors to France and the unique persepctive that offered her in writing the stories.

Clare Flynn stays at Galle Face Hotel, a key location in two of her Penang Series novels.

People sometimes ask me why I enjoy writing retreats. Surely you can write just as easily at home, or in a library or coffee shop? Isn’t it an unnecessary indulgence to travel somewhere else simply to sit with your imagination and put words on a page? Perhaps it is. But in my experience, a change of place can open creative floodgates that had previously been firmly closed. I’m writing this beside a palm‑fringed beach in Sri Lanka. I’ve been working all morning. On palm‑fringe

I had a writing drought for three months. Not what I’d expected when I set off to sail around the world in one hundred and thirty days, hoping to get my next book written.  With all that time and having finished my previous book I was certain I would have the next one complete by the time I landed back in Britain. But despite (or because of!) visiting so many wonderful places, I didn’t feel inspired and my laptop gathered dust as I whiled away sea days knitting, reading, draw

I’ve visited Istanbul several times – once in the mid 90s on holiday and several times on business with the odd weekend tagged on.  I...

My office was just down the road beside Darling Harbour and I used to have the occasional beer after work in the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel –...

This morning I was rereading a short story from the Discovering Diamonds: Stories from a Song  series — a collection of pieces inspired by music and written by authors from around the world. The story was The Hunter written by the award‑winning novelist Jean Gill, who lives in France and, among many other things, keeps bees. I really enjoyed reading her fantasy tale of a brave woman scaling a cliff on which her father had perished the previous year, in order to harvest the w