CLARE FLYNN

Sometimes when working I get dizzy. Not out of tiredness, though there's plenty of that, but from the distance I travel without leaving my chair. One day I'm walking the blacked-out streets of wartime Sydney, absorbing the anxiety of a city that suddenly finds the war not on the other side of the world but terrifyingly close to home. The next day, I'm on a hillside in Sri Lanka, back when it was called Ceylon, surrounded by a green counterpane of tea bushes stretching in ever

There are places that stay in your head long after you leave them. For me, Italy is one of those places. I first visited Italy when, aged seventeen, I went all over Europe for the first time, on a one-month InterRail holiday with friends after A Levels. Somehow I lived for a month on less than £50. I fell head over heels in love with the country and that has never left me. I was fortunate enough to live in Milan in the 1990s, working, learning the language, and getting to kno

I’m going to take you to some of the places that feature in UNDER A SOUTHERN SKY. Welcome to Sydney in 1942.

Novelist Clare Flynn discusses how good, supportive mothers actually undermine dramatic tension in storytelling—protagonists need challenges and setbacks, not loving parents ready to solve their problems.

I thought it might be interesting to recreate the routes taken independently and together by Norton and Stella in The Star of Ceylon.

Clare Flynn takes readers through the process of editing a book and getting it published.

Sadly, I never met either of my grandfathers – they both died in the 1930s when my parents were still children. My paternal grandfather,...

I had a writing drought for three months. Not what I’d expected when I set off to sail around the world in one hundred and thirty days, hoping to get my next book written.  With all that time and having finished my previous book I was certain I would have the next one complete by the time I landed back in Britain. But despite (or because of!) visiting so many wonderful places, I didn’t feel inspired and my laptop gathered dust as I whiled away sea days knitting, reading, draw

Final edits are completed on my latest book – number 15 is set for publication this June! I need to stop beating about the bush and tell...

Recently I visited Ireland for a family wedding. Whilst there, enjoying an evening in a local pub, I was reminded of one of the inspirations behind part of my book Storms Gather Between Us - an inspiration I'd entirely forgotten about until now!

My office was just down the road beside Darling Harbour and I used to have the occasional beer after work in the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel –...

Reviews for the Penang Series Known as the Penang Historischer Roman  in German, here are some of my favourites comments from readers.....

This morning I was rereading a short story from the Discovering Diamonds: Stories from a Song  series — a collection of pieces inspired by music and written by authors from around the world. The story was The Hunter written by the award‑winning novelist Jean Gill, who lives in France and, among many other things, keeps bees. I really enjoyed reading her fantasy tale of a brave woman scaling a cliff on which her father had perished the previous year, in order to harvest the w