Back in my Dalston study, I waited for the answer machine to disgorge its contents. On my desk, a draft of my short-story entry for the London New Writers’ Competition looked hopeless and dishevelled. The deadline wasn’t for another few months and the word count was a modest 5000 words but I was still struggling.
I’d discovered the competition in the Islington Green Waterstones a few months earlier. The theme for the short story was London as Diaspora City and having spent the previous 2 years teaching English to refugees at the refugee council, I felt that I had some modest insight into how the city might function as a beacon for a global diaspora. Sitting down on the stairs in Waterstones, the competition flyer in my hand, I looked at the banks of books flanking and surrounding me. There were so many, an impossible number. It made me wonder just how hard could it be to write a book?
I was about to find out.
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