Andrew Miller

After publishing The Land in Winter last October, I started writing short pieces. Short stories, I suppose, though I'm slightly reluctant to call them such, part of my continuing unease with the word 'story', which I think carries with it the danger of all manner of assumptions. For me it's a word that gives rise […]

I have a battered old volume of Iris Murdoch's essays, most of them written in the 1960s and 70s. The essays exude Oxbridge intellectual confidence (verging on the arrogant?). In gusts of precise, muscular language, she lays out her views on literature, philosophy, politics. We are slack and she wants us to toughen up. We […]

I want to write fiction that has no obvious message, that cannot be made smaller, that resists the single interpretation. That views morality as one force among many. That does not overly privilege love or treat it as a form of magic. That has to be swallowed whole. That neither offers nor resists consolation. That […]

I have, as a blogger, clearly failed. Six years since my last post! 2018 feels strangely innocent. Looked at from this side of the river it appears a land at peace, untroubled. Did it feel like that at the time? Probably not. But once again I find myself at the end of a long project […]

You have finished. Yes, this time you have really finished. It's done. They won't let you touch it. It's yours of course, but it's also theirs - perhaps theirs more than yours. Anyway, you hardly think about it anymore. When you do you wince. Nothing about it is quite right. You cannot love it (though […]

Coming close to signing off on the new book, I have a long phone conversation with my editor, mostly to do with prepositions. Language, stared at, does not stay still. Under the microscope little words have tiny tails, they wriggle. The sense then that language has a grammar, that grammar is made up of rules, […]

I suppose one thing the world really doesn't need is another blog but then the world has so many things it doesn't need and seems to bear up under the weight of them so here goes. The new website is intended to catch hold of fragments - reviews, essays, interviews - that deal with my […]