I’d kept a blog through my teenage years, partly out of curiosity about the Internet, which was still pretty new to us back then. I’d written diligently about completely inane and vapid details of my daily life as a completely ordinary teenager. Then at some point—I’m still not quite sure when—I stopped blogging and somehow […]

In 1999, the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, known for, amongst other things, pushing a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City (Paradox of Praxis 1, 1997), took a walk across Hyde Park in London. The walk, memorialised only in a simple, unembellished photograph of an aerial view of the park, he titled ‘Pebble Walk’, christening […]

In my final year at Junior College, when I was 18 and about three months away from the ‘A’ Levels, someone discovered that someone else had messed up a thing or two with the curriculum of my Higher Art class, and, as a result, we had unfortunately been missing out on a lot of the compulsory syllabus. […]

The room seemed so large back then. Huge. Even now, as I sit here trying to recall the details of it, what strikes me is its vastness, bathed in fluorescent white light, whiting out at the edges. It is bright, spacious, and cool, since we always had the air conditioning on for the night. Of […]

I first met Emily in 2013. But I’d been following her blog, The Incredible Rambling Elimy, for a year or two before that. So I knew she worked in a bookshop, that she loved reading as evidenced by the 100+ books she reviewed each year. I also knew she was an aspiring author, and had […]

One of my earliest memories is of getting caught in the revolving doors at the State Library as a three or four-year-old. In my own account of it, I was there with my Grandpa, and tripped and fell and ended up being pushed round and round inside the doors until some kind stranger was able […]

Ever noticed how Tom Sturridge always plays the bad boy? He was Captain Francis Troy in David Nicholls’ amazing adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, Jake in the Starz adaptation of Sweetbitter, and in the incredible biopic about Mary Shelley that came out last year, he played the original Bad Boy of Literature, Lord Byron.  One of […]

The other day, when I gave my Grandma and Grandpa their early copy of Well-Behaved Women, I found myself apologising for all the bad words I had used.  It’s not that I’ve used gratuitous swearing or offensive slurs or anything like that. It’s just that this is how my characters talk. Words like ‘fuck’ are part […]

There’s a lot of music in my stories. Contemporary music, the stuff I listen to when I’m writing now like Josh Pyke and the sweet-edged dark bands of my teenaged years like Fall Out Boy, has certainly had an effect on my writing, and if you read closely you might even find some echoes of […]

Can you tell us a little about yourself, and how you got started as a designer? Hello! I’m Marie, an illustrator from Singapore. I’ve always enjoyed story-telling, and drawing it out in particular, which would explain how I ended up in animation. After graduating, I still wanted to continue telling stories, but not in the […]