25 years on, Stephen King's memoir is still the best guide for writers
'His advice is sharp and practical,' John Grisham raves in the front matter of the new 25th anniversary edition. 'If you dream of writing novels, start with this timeless book.'
And King does have the credentials to back up his advice. The 77-year-old has written more than 60 novels. The best known are firmly in the horror genre — such as It, The Shining and Carrie — but he has also delved into crime, sci-fi and fantasy. Many of them have been adapted for the big screen and together they've sold over 350 million copies.
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Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Hundreds of Nigerian ‘authors' use visa scheme to enter Britain
Hundreds of Nigerian 'authors' have come to Britain using a visa scheme for literary talent, The Telegraph can reveal. Nigerians have made the most applications for entry to the UK via a little-known 'literature' visa for writers, which covers professed 'poets' and oral 'storytellers', than any other nationality. Applicants from Nigeria have also been the most successful in having claims to exceptional literary ability endorsed by the government quango Arts Council England, which has powers to review and endorse applications for 'Global Talent' visas. This visa route supports entry to Britain for exceptional individuals in music, theatre, and dance, with applicants expected to possess and prove artistic merit. There is also a category for great talents in 'literature', which covers a range of writers, including novelists, poets, spoken word performers, storytellers and creators of 'graphic novels and comics'. Successful applicants can bring their family to the UK as dependents and stay for up to five years at a time once endorsed by the Arts Council, and signed off by the Home Office. A rise in applications Nigerians have dominated this visa scheme over the past five years, putting in 125 applications, more than double the 61 received from the USA and far more than other Anglophone nations like Australia, Canada and New Zealand combined. Across that five-year period, 70 were rejected, and 54 were endorsed – more than any other country represented in official figures. Analysis of the talent visa numbers comes amid growing pressure on the Labour Government to tighten their stance on immigration, which in recent years has reached record levels both for legal and illegal arrivals. The past five years have also seen the making or securing of reputations for some prominent Nigerian writers, including Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. The work of the late writer Chinua Achebe's famed 1958 novel Things Fall Apart has become common on schools reading lists. However, the use of the literature visa appears to be part of a broader trend. The number of Global Talent visa applications being submitted from Nigeria has risen by 2,225 per cent since 2019. There were just 12 applications in 2019, but this rose to 279 in 2024. Across that entire period, Nigerians made 729 applications across artistic Global Talent categories – dance, fashion, music, film and TV, theatre, combined arts, and visual arts – second only to the US, with 977. Despite the glut of applications, just 59 per cent of the entries from Nigeria were endorsed – the lowest of any country apart from Ghana. Since 2019, more than 5,000 applications have been made across all nationalities, with 3,600 endorsed by the Arts Council. The Home Office does not break down figures for how many of these endorsements then lead to visas being signed off by Whitehall officials. Other nationalities have also submitted large numbers of applications including Russia (725), China (492), Australia (233) and India (160). The revelations about the Global Talent route come after The Telegraph reported the Labour Government intended to protect skilled worker visa routes for diversity and inclusion experts, despite their promise to reduce immigration. The Home Office has safeguarded visa application routes for those with specific skills, creating a temporary list of 'shortage' occupations. This list safeguards the positions of 'poet' and 'blogger', roles that come under the visa route for the broad category of 'authors, writers and translators'. The median earning for a self-employed writer, according to a 2022 report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, was just £7,000. While only the median, this is below the £12,570 personal allowance for income tax. The shortage occupation list will drop out of use, pending a review, in December 2026.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
More sex please, we're bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel
When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden's brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women's prize for fiction last month, they weren't just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July's exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic's work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality. While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and 'romantasy' – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today. Ours is a dual age of identity politics and porn. We get our identities from sex – queer or straight, pansexual or 'incel' – but it's also the white-hot arena in which identity melts down. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, when pornography is everywhere and Gillian Anderson is collecting thousands of sexual fantasies with anthropological zeal, it seems we still need literature to tell us new things about sex. What I found, reading recent work by authors including Rooney, Van der Wouden, Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Eimear McBride, were unpredictable fusions of the two impulses. Lovers, dutifully preoccupied with questions of identity by day, find that in bed they can transcend selfhood, outstripping their identities. To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
The Lylas: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
The sisters of chart sensation Bruno Mars try to take the world by storm 2013
