Welcome to the Ridge
An olive branch outside the academy walls
How do you find people to write with? How do you sustain the collaboration? And how do you breathe fresh air into established writing relationships? What do you expect a writing partner to do – work on the same text or different texts, in the same institution or outside, at the same career stage or…
Stet summer
Summer is coming in. You don’t have to sing cuckoo, but it helps. If you don’t know why you might, listen to Sumer is icumen in. The Hilliard Ensemble apparently have good Middle English pronunciation. I can’t judge, but would expect no less. The further north you live, the more extreme the relief. Last month…
A NEaT few years
I became vice chair of Nordic Editors and Translators (NEaT) in the middle of that first few weeks of lockdown. Two years later, I was elected chair, and this week, after four years in post, I handed over to our new chair. For me, a key thing in positions of trust is making sure that…
London Book Fair 2026 – human readers, unite!
In the mayhem of the London Book Fair, one thing was clear. Human readers want books written by other humans, and they want to read them together. Publishers can now mark their works as Human Authored as part of a Society of Authors initiative. Mock-up books and a mock-up crime scene told generative AI companies,…
Alphabetical diaries
Worried about productivity? Planning to get that book finished by doing a daily six impossible pages before breakfast? Don’t. Sheila Heti took ten years to write 165 pages. Ironic to readers from this corner of the globe, given that “heti” in Finnish means “at once”. Heti boiled her journals down and rearranged them in alphabetical…
Cover image: the ridge/harju in Jyväskylä. All photos (c) Kate Sotejeff-Wilson
Ridge Writing Retreats 