What the short story needs above all is for one of the big publishers to get an equivalent series up and running and to support it and promote it.

I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic.

Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.

I have no patience with up-themselves authors who complain about having to trail round a few bookshops signing stock.

There has been corruption in the Belgian civil service and at government level for decades. The Royal family do what they can to hold things together, and they don't do a bad job.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

The short story feels like the most natural length for prose fiction, or certainly for the kind of ideas and situations I like to encounter.