Guest writers

  • Renaturing

    Contributor: Author James Canton So, just for a moment, imagine your most idyllic literary festival event… a marque packed full of an intelligent, wise and interested audience, a fellow speaker who fits perfectly, a chair who coordinates the chat with wit and ease. Then throw in a castle as venue, a little over two miles from your home. Perfect. The EA Festival at Hedingham Castle over the weekend of June 14-15th 2025 – run by the amazing Joanne Ooi — was just such a dream for me. I was paired in a talk on ‘Renaturing’ – the title of my new […]

  • Writer In Residence (Jane- no longer tame)

    A blog. Written by customer and friend of Red Lion Books, Jane Herd Jane- no longer tame Writer in Residence- Red Lion Book Shop, Colchester High Street, 5 th to 23rd August 2025 As Jane- no longer tame I am a feminist writer. My nom de plume arose spontaneously at the end of one of a series of poems using the metaphor of birds to explore the need to fly the nest and break from the gilded cage. One of my friends on hearing this title joked when had I ever been tame, I may speak out but I have always […]

  • A year in the life of a customer, book by book

    Some books what I have read in 2024 This year, I saw the phrase “nourishing seepage” in an online book preview – on the first page, in fact. I ordered it (The Girls, by John Bowen) immediately. First published in 1986, you can only get it second hand in the UK, but this “wry, macabre tale of simple country living, brutal murder, and a reasonably happy couple” has just been republished by McNally Editions in America, so hopefully some enterprising indie publisher here will follow suit. It’s gloriously mad, and one of those rare books where a man has written convincing […]

  • Here Comes The Fun

      We were delighted to welcome Ben Aitken to the woods this summer for our Words In The Woods day festival.   Ben is bestselling author of Here Comes The Fun: A Journey into the Serious Business of Having a Laugh (Icon, July 2024). Perhaps you have read The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple (2022), The Gran Tour: Travels with my Elders (2020), A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland (2019), or Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island (2015)?  He has also been published in The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The […]

  • Taking Inspiration from Real Life Stories by Liz Trenow

    Taking inspiration from real life stories By Liz Trenow, 2024, Colchester based best-selling author of The Secret Sister, The Last Telegram, The Forgotten Seamstress, The Silk Weaver, Searching for My Daughter and five other novels. When searching for inspiration for my novels the most important thing is that I feel passionate about the subject. I’m going to spend at least a year in the company of these characters and if I don’t care deeply about them it’s going to be tough going. So most of my stories have a basis in real life, and my latest book, The Secret Sister is […]

  • In the age of beautiful copies, giveaways, and freebies, are our reviews still honest?

    By Regina Lopez Puerta   For the past couple of years, I’ve been swinging between the world of bookselling and the world of book influencing. They often collide, but surprisingly, they also divert.    In a way, a bookseller has to be a book influencer as well. We’re often invited to events, get free copies of upcoming books and are greatly encouraged to share our thoughts on them.    The system of proofs and advanced copies helps us do our job properly for various reasons.   For starters, it lets us know if a book is a good fit for our […]

  • Guest blog from regular customer Chris Coates

      “I asked the doctor to take my fingers off; he refused, so I pulled them off myself and felt absolutely no pain in doing it”. I suppose it’s inevitable that as a middle-aged man I’ve started reading military history, but I’ll say this for Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart’s Happy Odyssey: I don’t think it’s typical of the genre. In a long career, Carton de Wiart was shot in the ankle, ear, face, head, hip, leg, and stomach, survived two plane crashes, escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp, and probably inspired the “fire-eating” Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook in Evelyn […]