Dr Tony Shaw

Sometimes you can do things in far-off places – as I did a few months ago when searching around for literary landmarks in seven Southern st...

It's sometimes odd, what can greet you when you turn a corner – either metaphorically or physically – but I was pleasantly surprised to ...

The film director Mike Leigh was perhaps originally best known for his BBC Plays for Today Nuts in May (1976) and, perhaps above all, Abiga...

It seems like many years that Steve Bell has been keeping many of us sane, in an insane world, with his particular brand of literate humour....

Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution. The Haitian writer and artist Frankétienne, dubbed ’Monsieur Haiti’ by ...

Only very rarely is it almost an epiphanic moment when I discover a writer or singer I'd never heard of before, but I felt such a moment...

The widely advertised art gallery Notingham Contemporary opened its doors on 14 November 2009, but due to a mixture of circumstances - the e...

lastingtribute.co.uk, a website where people leave tributes to the dead, states 'We offer a trusted brand which is part of the Daily Ma...

Edwidge Danticat (1969- ) was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and was twelve years old when she left with her family for New York. She write...

Ballard and Hudson's Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia is a wonderful, nearly 700-page feast of a book, containing writings of 1...

In the world of Southern literature, Southern Gothic is by no means rare, and indeed continues to be strong, but although Southern Gothic is...

So we pulled into a rest area on our way from Savannah, Tennessee, and were greatly impressed by this adjacent view of Nickajack Lake. We we...

Too bad that we've not had time to see Ian Curtis's kerbside gravestone, or the house in which he lived in Macclesfield, Cheshire:...

This is a strange, complex, and disturbing book. At the end of A Long and Happy Life (1962) Rosacoake Mustian, pregnant by Wesley Beavers, ...

Grace Lumpkin (1891-1980) was born in Milledgeville, Georgia, and at the age of about ten her family moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and ...

'Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of car...

Olive Ann Burns (1924-90) was brought up in Commerce, Georgia, educated in Macon, Georgia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and spent a numb...

As far as literature is concerned, Minnesota is popularly known as the birth state of Scott Fitzgerald (St Paul) and, er, Garrison Keillor (...