I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling deep waves of nostalgia whenever New Year’s Eve swings round yet again. Inevitably, I turn to my old diaries, digging them out of the wooden chest in my bedroom. And as I browse through the time-worn pages, I sink into a world gone by: timeless memories that are [...]
Dear Organizers of Auschwitz-Birkenau Tours,I’m writing to you as someone who, several decades ago, visited Auschwitz for the first time and had an experience that profoundly shaped my understanding of history. I have been back several times since then, but that first visit is what left the deepest impression on me. The silence, the sombre [...]
Before going any further, how about this quote to make you sit up and reflect. 'How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.' So, did it make you sit up and reflect? If not, then perhaps Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons, will not be your cup [...]
After Neil Armstrong’s death in 2012, his family made the touching statement: “Next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.” Isn’t that’s a lovely piece of advice? Not just in memory of Neil Armstrong, the first man [...]
If you hear the name Rwanda, most people will either: associate it with the mountain gorilla; recall the appalling genocide of 1994 that swept across the country with devastating speed, claiming a million lives in the process; ask you: “Rwanda? Who’s that?” (which is precisely what a young shop assistant said when I enquired about [...]
For the last two years I have been writing, re-writing, changing the title, re-writing yet again, and at last finalising my latest novel, which was inspired by my trip to Rwanda in October 2016. In a nutshell, Once Upon a Thousand Hills is a very modern love story that blends a risky cocktail of sex, [...]
What a cute little word ‘tweet’ is. How innocuous-sounding. How frail and birdlike. But how deceptive, as well. How much power there can be in the hands of a short, carelessly knocked-together bunch of words. And that’s exactly what so many tweets are - short and careless, even boring, stupid, annoying. Why did you bother [...]
Wendy Skorupski 