Fi Phillips

The intention of making new year's resolutions has always been to start anew but seeing as 2014 will be more of a continuation for me (working on my novel, writing more plays, losing more weight), I decided to make just one new effort. I'm constantly reading (on my bedside cabinet at the moment are Titania Hardie's The Rose Labyrinth and the first S kulduggery Pleasant novel) but in 2014, I've decided that I'll step away from my usual genres and authors and support some of the writers that I follow, know and converse with. So my reading list for the first half of 2014 looks something like this: Ninety-Five Percent Human by Suzanna Williams : a young adult alien adventure inspired by the 'Welsh Roswell', an alleged UFO crash in the Berwyn Mountains in 1974. A is for Angelica by Iain Broome : his debut novel, "Gordon Kingdom struggles with the fate of his seriously-ill wife while patiently observing and methodically recording the lives of th...

I was a reader long before I was a writer. As an only child to older parents, I was allowed to read whatever book, out of the many crammed shelves in our home, took my fancy. I read thrillers, fairytales, history, plays, poetry - making no differentiation between genre or form. As a writer now, I continue to read. I don't just read what I write though (plays, murder mysteries, fantasy). I do my best to stretch my reading choices to other less familiar genres too. This is what I've read over the last six months. The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie I came to Titania Hardie through her books on witchcraft. She has a very calm writing voice so I was excited to buy her first adult fiction book. The Rose Labyrinth is a historical mystery featuring Elizabethan spies and geniuses, a family legacy and the long, hot summer of 2003. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell This non fiction book discusses Campbell's theory of the journey of the archetypal hero as ...