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

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