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Emily Mackie and Robert Williams
Published on Saturday, 21 August 2010

Two first-time novelists and blogger favourites, Emily Mackie and Robert Williams, have taken over the Writers' Retreat. In case you were wondering, this is great news.

Mackie, from northern Scotland, reads from her novel And This is True, which she wrote as part of her Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa. Confident and accessible, Mackie chats with us for a while then bursts into a theatrical, captivating reading style, beginning with the jarring first line 'I kissed my father once, while he was sleeping'.

Mackie's work brings great significance to the minutiae of everyday life. Household items and awkward movements become potential catalysts, and the awkward, familiar dialogue is utterly believable. 'It's not actually about incest at all', she tells us. 'It just seems like it is.'

Williams gained his publication deal with Faber and Faber when he won a first novel competition run by Waterstone's. At the time, Williams was a musician and songwriter, worked in a Manchester branch of the bookshop and shared a house with his bandmates which he describes as 'pure squalor'.

Williams also worked in a high school library, and initially marketed his novel Luke and Jon as teenage fiction, though he worries that it will be 'the sort of book teenagers are forced to read'.

Williams tells us he 'can't do that looking-up thing', before reading with an understated style that suits his work well. The 'I to You' narrative in the reading from Luke and Jon is made of economical, simple language which effectively shows the character of a grieving teenage boy in unfamiliar circumstances, through subtle physical signs foreshadowing a deeper relationship and containing the sort of brutal details a grieving person might notice.

Mackie tells us that she has been writing in the voice of her character Nevis since she was about seventeen, when she was also writing 'bad screenplays and a soap'. She created a farm as a literary tool, because she wanted to create a feeling of isolation, but put the farm up for sale and got rid of the animals because she didn't know much about farming. Williams tells us that songwriting was a great way of building discipline because 'unless you're Pink Floyd, you generally get about four minutes'.

Both writers show great enthusiasm and sensitivity for their work, and have a realistic approach to the notions of success and the craft of writing. They're funny, intelligent and completely engaging. They refreshingly break the loose rules of the literary event by asking one another spontaneous follow-up questions, spurring the event on with their wit and curiosity.

This is one of the most satisfying events I've seen in Edinburgh this year.

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