Tuesday 27 March 2012

Five Sentences with Sarah Salway

So, moving on from giving away the ending to Caroline Smailes's latest book, but sticking with the theme of endings (the relevance of that statement will become clear later), I have the huge pleasure of welcoming Sarah Salway to my blog.


Sarah Salway
Sarah was one of the tutors on the Arvon course I took back in January, and she was kind enough to invite me to visit her blog shortly afterwards to help publicise the competition I was running to promote my anthology*. Well, now Sarah has a new book out - and I'm very pleased to be able to return the favour.


The book in question is Sarah's first published collection of poetry, called "You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book". You can listen to Sarah reading selected poems on her pop-up poetry tour, the itinerary of which you can find HERE. And I'd urge you to go and check them out; they're very good.

Sarah's gift with language is the ability to take the very ordinary and commonplace and approach it from a new angle, sometimes revealing surprising beauty, sometimes unmasking unsettling darkness. She's won considerable acclaim for her novels (I've read "Something Beginning With..."; "Tell Me Everything" is next on my list), and from the sounds of things her poetry is being equally well received.

Sarah has a feature on her blog called Five Sentences, in which she invites her guests to complete a set of statements. In honour of her visit, I have basically stolen the idea, but given it a twist in that I've asked her to provide the beginnings to a set of 'endings' I concocted. Over to you, Sarah...

  • Until I realise how much time I've wasted, watching videos of dogs on YouTube always makes me smile.
  • I collect photographs of benches, and their memorial plaques, on a blog - www.aquietsitdown.blogspot.com - although not many people know that.
  • Watching live bands play, wandering round city streets with my camera and good installation art never fails to inspire me.
  • I would love to be one of those people who say, 'Oh, I only drink Champagne, dahling' - but only if somebody else paid for it!
  • My family, true friends, laughter, cocktails, good food, the sun and plenty of time to talk or to say nothing are the ingredients for my perfect day.

Thank you - and that does sound like a perfect day. To celebrate, why not treat yourself to some Champagne? It's virtual, so you can drink as much as you like and still be okay to drive home.



* The competition finished a while ago, but the anthology is still very much available. You can get it here or here, if you happened to feel like grabbing a copy.

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