News, comment and features

It's less than a month since I commented on a new novel that it "belongs to what I can with confidence assume to be a vanishingly small category: novels where the action takes place in Palmers Green", and what do I find? A feature in this month's Enfield Dispatch under the headline "Putting Palmers Green on the page" about another recently published novel set in PG!

The author of both novel and newspaper article is PG resident Natasha Boydell. The Legacy of Eve, described as "a drama about motherhood and a family touched by tragedy", is the third novel she's had published. Her debut publication, a "domestic noir" entitled The Missing Husband, reached the top 100 in Amazon Kindle's chart, after which she signed a multi-book deal with her publisher. She's already finished a fourth, Ask Natalie, set in Cyprus and due to be published in December.

Considering that her first novel was published only eighteen months ago, she's clearly well and truly overcome the writer's block that she suffered from until she spotted, on Palmers Green Community, information about a course called "Prioritise your Writing" being run by the Collage Writing Room in Wood Green.

That was pre-pandemic, when the Writing Room was literally a large room in a repurposed office block round the back of the bus garage in Wood Green. In 2020 the courses went online and have stayed there ever since, and recently the Writing Room separated from Collage Arts, but they still have the same line-up of tutors and I continue to plug their courses on this website - I attended a masterclass there myself back in the day.

Speaking of masterclasses, this autumn the Writing Room is running fortnightly sessions on Sunday mornings. They start on 2nd October, when April Yee will be looking at the history of documentary poetry with the goal of helping participants launch their own historically rooted and personally relevant projects.

So how does PG come over in the new novel? Pretty positively, I imagine, as Natasha, who moved here nine years ago, says lots of very nice things about us in her Dispatch article. But we'll have to read the book to find out!