Steve Griffin's Blog, page 14

Wedding Song – a poem for newlyweds

I wrote this poem to read at the service of a friend’s wedding. Weddings are uniquely exciting, the perfect time to remember that doors are always opening, that every moment offers a new beginning.  But weddings fly by too fast.  So I wanted to capture that sense of freshness and love, not only for the newlyweds themselves but for everyone who had come to witness and celebrate their marriage.

Wedding Song

And as they came out into the gladbright day
the light sprang up in their eyes
for all...

St Paul’s School Book Club visit… and The City of Light Cake!

It’s not every day you get a cake made of your book…

Thank you so much to the readers of St Paul’s school Year 6 book club for their enthusiasm and fantastic questions yesterday.  It was great to talk to them about the inspiration for my books, from a Herefordshire garden, to trips to India, Africa and Disneyland.

And particular thanks to the two members who baked cakes, including this one inspired by the The City of Light!

For more pics, visit the school blog here.

The post St Paul’s School...

Land of Mine: life as a Prisoner of War

I’ve just watched the harrowing Danish / German war film, Land of Mine. It’s about a group of German Prisoners of War who, contrary to the Geneva Convention, are made to find and defuse 45,000 land mines along a short stretch of brilliant white coastline. That’s 45,000 out of the 2.2 million mines that were laid along the Danish coast, more than the rest of Europe altogether. This is where the Führer thought the invasion would come.

The film is heart-wrenching. The soldiers are all in their t...

Ugandan Bestiary – poems and photos from a wildlife safari

In 2007, my wife took a volunteer position with a charity in Kampala in Uganda. When the post finished, I joined her for a fortnight. We hired a driver and went around the country, seeing some impressive landscapes and wildlife. We saw tree-climbing lions, a huge spider in our bedroom (which next day our driver told us we should not have left alone – ‘very dangerous’), a cobra, crocodiles, chimpanzees, elephants, gorillas and hippos. I drew on much of this experience for The Dreamer Falls, an...

Housemartin

This incident with an adventurous (or possibly confused) housemartin took place when I was staying in a cottage on holiday in rural France. It was an intriguing place, in the grounds of a very small chateau, whose elderly owner used to stand every morning at one of her parapets with a huge Great Dane beside her. The first night I was terrified someone was breaking in because the electrics tripped out downstairs, making a huge cracking sound. That cottage felt like a different world, and a di...

Video – Inspiration for The Secret of the Tirthas: The Garden of Rooms

Here’s a short video about the real English garden that inspired the garden of portals in The Secret of the Tirthas

http://www.steve-griffin.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/VID_20180105_141248064.mp4

The Lesson – Short Story

Before I began writing novels I wrote a few short stories. Mimi, based on a true story of witchcraft in Zambia, can be found here.

And here is The Lesson, a short, apocryphal tale of a boy returning to his old school, surprised to find that he is not the only one still alive. I’ve made only one or two minor edits, so this is pretty much as I wrote it in my early twenties.

 

The Lesson

On the seventeenth day I came across my old school on the hill.

For seven hundred years its granite towers ha...

The Rewards of Writing

Let me start by saying it’s not for the sales – although of course they are welcome! I write simply because I enjoy it. I’ve always written, starting with my own New Avengers and James Bond stories when I was eight, and later on casting my school friends as the heroes and villains of action stories and westerns. It was fun – and gratifying – to see them being passed round class.

After focusing on poetry in my twenties and thirties, I am back to writing adventure stories with The Secret of th...

Chinese edition of The City of Light

Something I never expected in my wildest dreams when I began writing The City of Light was that one day it would be published in China.

But, thanks to the fantastic team at Fiberead, it soon will be, along with all the other books in The Secret of the Tirthas series, which are currently at various stages of translation / proofreading.

Here is the amazing Mandarin cover for The City of Light:

 

Best Books: Grown-ups

My last post was a collection of my Goodreads reviews of the best Young Adult and Children’s books that I’ve read over the past couple of years. In the same vein, here’s some of the books for grown-ups that I’ve reviewed in the same time period:

Jack, by A.M. Homes

One of the best coming of age novels. Jack’s initial mortification at his dad’s coming out is soon compounded by everyone at school finding out, and not helped by the anodyne wisdom of the adults around him. But his parents’ separa...