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A few things I’ve enjoyed in 2024.

Play of the year

Robert Icke’s retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus, at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, was spellbinding from first moment to last. You know what’s going to happen yet it pulses with the tense energy of a political thriller. Hitting the same heights as Icke’s masterful Oresteia from 2015, the considered and dynamic production is brought home by captivating performances from Mark Strong and Lesley Manville.

Album of the year

The long-anticipated return of The Cure with Songs of a Lost World made me feel both old and young. Young as it hurled me back 35 years to playing Disintegration on the day of release, Robert Smith’s intonation unchanged, the layered guitars and synths bridging the years. And old because this is a dispatch from the edge of the abyss, a meditation on death and dying to sit with Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.

Books of the year

With Come and Get It Kiley Reid built on the promise of her debut Such a Fun Age, delivering a freewheeling campus novel that skewers the power dynamics of money, race and class. David Peace’s Munichs also lived up to expectations, meticulously recreating the days following the 1958 Munich air disaster. Of the older novels I read in 2024, the standout was Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, driving her Regeneration trilogy to its heart-shattering conclusion.

Song of the year

I loved ‘The Feminine Urge’ by The Last Dinner Party, from their excellent debut album Prelude to Ecstasy. A heart-pounding chorus that turns out to have been only a pre-chorus for an even more ridculously catchy skyscraping refrain. Music that takes you out of yourself, creating a moment out of time.

Here’s to more such moments in 2025.

Popping back on here with a brief recap of the year.

Life continues to get in the way of writing somewhat, but I was pleased to complete two new projects this year, of which I hope to share news in 2023.

Sadly, Covid again restricted my theatre visits but I was very glad to catch David Eldridge’s Middle at the National Theatre, a deeply poignant two-hander about the choices we face at the middle of life’s journey.

Of the new(ish) books I read this year, I relished Alejandro Zambra’s magnificent Chilean Poet (translated by Megan McDowell), full of invention and insight, and Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, a bleak exposure of the wreckage of war.

And of the slightly older books I caught up on, I loved Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s extraordinary Half of a Yellow Sun. I’ve also been enjoying Elizabeth Strout’s touching and beautifully observed Amgash novels.

Finally, the Jericho Prize for new Black-British children’s authors is running again. The deadline for picture book submissions is 9 January 2023. I’m delighted still to be involved with this important competition providing comprehensive, lasting support for Black-British writers.

Wishing you all the best for 2023. Let’s make it a good one.