Arts: Books/Film/Visual
I interviewed William Boyd for his directorial debut on the Battle of the Somme; Roddy Doyle for the second part of his The Last Roundup trilogy, Oh, Play That Thing; Bill Bryson for A Walk In The Woods, his hike along sections of the Appalachian Trail; and popular children’s fantasy-adventure author Eoin Colfer. There were early encounters with Will Self and American crime writer Walter Mosley. Other authors I have profiled include Dervla Murphy, Alexander Stuart and Jenny Diski; I also reviewed books for GQ for several years. I’ve met some pioneering film directors, such as Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Steven Soderbergh. I interviewed Martin Scorsese in Paris about the influence on his work of the English film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; I turned our conversation into a ghost-written homage to the “subversive commercial” duo.
Many of the stories I’ve written have had a strong visual element to them, and I’ve worked on features with such fine photographers as Seamus Murphy (in Bosnia), Pieter Hugo (in Mozambique), Ziyah Gafić Three further visually-led stories I’ve enjoyed working on are: a profile of the great American “photographer of habitat” Robert Polidori; a Sunday Times article on British sculptor Antony Gormley (and his charity chief executive brother Brendan); and a feature on an installation in Ireland created by horticultural artist Tony Heywood and sound experimentalist David Toop. Further arts pieces are here.
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