Author and journalist Fiona Neill explores the experience of growing up in a creatively successful family in FAMOUS FOOTSTEPS – a major new series starting this week on BBC Radio 4. . Fiona considers the challenges of maintaining a creative career while bringing up small children. How does a writer, working at home, manage to carve out the mental and physical space to work? Is the ‘pram in the hallway’ really a barrier to creative thought? She talks to Jennifer Saunders, Adrian Edmondson, Daphne Du Maurier’s daughter Tessa Montgomery and songwriter Guy Chambers about their experiences of balancing these conflicting demands.
Listen in on Tuesday at 09:30 on BBC Radio 4 and throughout the week on Listen Again here
Fiona’s new novel FRIENDS, LOVERS AND OTHER INDISCRETIONS is out on Feb 1Oth in paperback from Arrow.
Yes Man author
Danny Wallace is to star in an American television pilot of his new book
Awkward Situations for Men.
The title, which will be published in the UK on 3rd June by Ebury Press, has been commissioned for a pilot episode by American television network ABC.
The TV project, from Warner Bros. TV and Heyday Films, will follow Wallace’s character as he moves to America with his wife, only to discover that his everyday behaviour clashes with American values and gets him into trouble.
Wallace said: “I’m thrilled that the next book will have a life beyond the pages… Making a TV show for an American audience is exciting, but daunting, too… nevertheless, I intend to give it a good go, for Britain, and to avoid as many awkward situations as I can while doing so…”
Time to start with a clean 
slate and to finally get your life in order? Luckily Mike Gayle has done a lot of the work for you in his laugh-out-loud memoir THE TO-DO LIST.
Here are some wonderful early reviews for the paperback….
MAIL ON SUNDAY (3 Jan)
“A book guaranteed to appeal to disorganized slackers everywhere”
CLOSER MAGAZINE (5 Jan)
“You’ll laugh out loud throughout this brilliant and utterly hilarious read” *****
The formal dinner party may be dead, but its exuberant younger cousin lives on in a thousand middle-class homes – informal, competitive, prone to tears and culinary disasters and a hotbed of gossip. It’s boosted by the phenomenal ratings of television’s Come Dine With Me and now you can join in too.
The Lady, courtesy of Jessica Ruston, is hosting its very own supper party each week in Come for Dinner, a serial that takes place in and around a pocket of streets in South London, and tells the stories of a group of friends and neighbours through their dinner parties and kitchen suppers.
Come for Dinner and meet a group of characters who you will grow to love – peer through the French windows of their kitchens, and eavesdrop over the pre-dinner drinks, sit down at their tables and gasp at the revelations that follow…
You can read the first episode online here
“What I really want to read is a proper, old-fashioned blockbuster like they used to do. You know?” a friend said to me a couple of 
years ago. And I did know. I knew exactly the sort of book she was talking about. That conversation planted the seed of the idea which became my first novel, Luxury, which is just that – an old-fashioned blockbuster, brought bang up to date.
When I started writing Luxury, I did a lot of thinking about what makes a novel a blockbuster, as opposed to a saga, or chick lit. While the traditional definition of a blockbuster is simply a mega-seller, like their cinematic counterparts, to call a book a blockbuster implies something more than simply selling in droves – although of course one always hopes they will do that as well…..
So says Jessica Ruston, author of the sparklingly good LUXURY (out now from Headline) who reveals the vital ingredients for a blockbusting novel in The Guardian. Click here to reveal all.
Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, is today (Wednesday 18th November) announced as Chair of the judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Andrew Motion is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999 for a ten year term. He has received numerous awards for his writing. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to literature in 2009.
Andrew Motion comments, ‘It’s an honour to be asked to chair the Man Booker Prize, which has consistently been a focus for the best fiction of recent years. It’s an exciting challenge too: a lot of difficult decisions lie ahead.
I greatly look forward to a year of reading voraciously.’
The longlist, ‘The Booker Dozen’ – the 12 (or 13) titles under serious consideration for the prize – will be announced in July 2010. The shortlist of six books will be announced in September 2010. The Man Booker Prize 2010 winner will be announced on the BBC from London’s Guildhall at an awards ceremony on Tuesday 12th October 2010.
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