by NiallBourke | Dec 6, 2020 | Reviews
Panenka – Rónán Hession (Bluemoose Books, May 2021). A celebration of the things other novels often avoid – and all the better for it. A wise man recently told me there are an estimated three billion football fans worldwide. Now this might be a slight overestimate...
by NiallBourke | Oct 22, 2020 | Reviews
My story ‘The Erection Specialists’ was published in The Honest Ulsterman on 22nd September 2020 – and if you are interested you can read it here. It is entirely fictional, but based loosely (very loosely!) on my experiences putting up marquees...
by NiallBourke | Oct 13, 2020 | Reviews
Some of what I’ve been reading this year in no particular order: Tennis Lessons (Susannah Dickey – Doubleday): Equal parts funny and poignant, it chronicles a young misfit’s coming-of-age. The voice is razor sharp, as are the wry observations about...
by NiallBourke | Feb 4, 2020 | Reviews
With the U.K sitting in 18th position in the latest Pisa rankings, and the predictable furore about whether this is a justification or indictment of recent educational policy, it’s worth asking do we really know what the Pisa tables mean? On Tuesday 3rd December 2019...
by NiallBourke | Jan 18, 2020 | Reviews
When Labour’s Angela Rayner announced she would scrap Ofsted, I was surprised she was met with such widespread opposition. I mean, I expected some dissenting voices but, from what I saw on the Twiittersphere (and beyond), the idea of scrapping Ofsted wasn’t just...
by NiallBourke | Jan 14, 2020 | Reviews
One thing I’ve been asked regularly at readings and events (well, by ‘regularly’ I mean ‘more than once’) is how emerging poets can go about building up to getting their debut collection published. Emerging fiction writers generally understand that to get a novel...
