Robert O’Connor’s Blood and Circuses


Robert O'Connor's first book Blood and Circuses charts his journeys through the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, looking at how football culture is tied up with ideas of nationhood, history, and power.

For the Artellus blog, Robert talks about how he went from rookie sports journalist in the UK to writing a book about footballing culture in remote corners of Eastern European.

Blood and Circuses is out now on Biteback Publishing, and can be purchased here.

“I knew from the earliest days of my career as a football journalist that I wanted to write about more than just the domestic game in England.

It’s not easy as a young writer (relatively speaking – I was 25 when I first turned my hand to scribbling about football) starting out in this business. The sheer breadth of competition that you’re up against is daunting. Finding a unique angle on something like the Premier League in the Sky Sports age is next to impossible.

All the biggest news stories are being covered by the heavyweight personalities at the national newspapers, and getting access to big names for interviews can be hellishly hard, even for those blessed with initiative and the fearlessness to stick your neck out (of which I had neither).

My solution was to pack a bag and fly off to Eastern Europe to look for stories that hadn’t been told. Football behind the old Iron Curtain has been quite well documented if you know where to look, so I had to look between the cracks of the cracks and go where virtually no English football journalist had been.

So in March 2016, scraping together a couple of hundred pounds from my meager income as an ad hoc freelancer, I got on a bus from Sheffield to Heathrow and flew to Pristina – the capital city of the former Yugoslav republic of Kosovo. It was the first time I had left the country alone, and I had no idea what I would do when I arrived. A couple of emails placed to the local football authorities hooked me up with a few names to interview and matches to attend, and within a week I had the foundations for what eventually became Blood & Circuses.

I’d made the transition to writing full-time only about six months earlier. I’d gone back to university at 26 to train properly as a journalist and jump through the NCTJ’s educational hoops, which gave me a bit of breathing room to start doing my first paid writing, at FourFourTwo and VICE. My first proper break came when I was offered a freelance job with the Bleacher Report doing these huge in-depth, 4,000-word investigations, which enabled me to finally quit the myriad part-time jobs I had stayed on in after my studies.

Freelance jobs came and went over the next few years. I moved back to London but eschewed pursuing staff work as I needed the freedom to be able to disappear for weeks at a time to obscure outposts in Eastern Europe. But my travels meant I was able to get my first heavyweight bylines; The Times, the BBC, The Telegraph and The Independent all carried my reporting over the next few years, and I was finally able to articulate exactly where my work as a journalist was leading me. Currently I contribute ad hoc as a freelance reporter to the iThe Times and The Sun (if any of my editors there are reading this and would like to take me on full-time, you’ve got my number).

I continued to write from wherever my travels took me up until the end of 2019, which by then included each of Europe’s separatist statelets; Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Donetsk – the principal subjects of Blood & Circuses.

I believe I got the green light that the book was going to be published whilst half asleep in a backpackers hostel in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. That night at a snow-swept Olympiskiy Stadium as I watched a drab Champions League game between Shakhtar Donetsk and Lyon, the perishing cold didn’t bother me at all.”


Words by Robert O’Connor, whose first book Blood and Circuses: A Football Journey Through Europe’s Rebel Republics is out now on Biteback Publishing. Thanks to Robert for writing for our blog and the ongoing pleasure of being his literary agents.

‘What’s the world you came out of?’ Juliet Bates


Juliet Bates hails from the North East of England and lives in France teaching art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Caen in Normandy. Her debut novel The Missing was published in 2009 on Linen Press, her short fiction has appeared in various publications.

Bates' latest novel The Colours is out now on Fleet Reads, an imprint of Little Brown. This sweeping novel features a mother and son separated in the early 1900s. With its rich visual descriptions the novel is an exploration of looking differently at our surroundings and relationships to place. 

Juliet, your latest novel The Colours has just come out, what’s it about?

The Colours is a novel about a mother and a son, Ellen and Jack. Despite their intimate connection they’re separated for most of the novel which explores Jack’s slow reconciliation with his mother’s condition and, not unconnected to his mother, Jack’s reconciliation with his hometown and the landscape and environment around it. That’s at the centre of the novel, the people part.

And the non-people part?

The town itself is a fairly important character and I was interested in the way in which the environments and landscapes changed over the period of the 70 years of the novel: socially and geographically. It’s also a novel about looking. Looking in the context of being an artist in Jack’s case and in terms of Ellen and her synesthesia. Ellen sees things in a slightly oblique, strange, oddly coloured way. I suppose it’s also a book about the way in which people perceive the same things differently. In this novel you have these two characters in parallel seeing this landscape and environment in very different ways.

So there’s a connection to your last novel, The Missing, when it comes to themes of people’s ways of processing and perception?

Yes, and understanding things that have happened in the past in various different ways, which I hadn’t picked up on when I was writing The Colours, but there you go!

Well now we’re all cooped up in our homes it’s a great time to release a book about seeing things differently.

Absolutely. Everyday I get emails from students sending me pictures of stuff that they’ve been doing and it’s great. I hope that other people are doing the same, where they’re nudged into creativity using a very minimal amount of materials and things they’ve got to hand. I sense that a lot of people, not just my students, are experimenting and being inventive. I’m sounding very positive, but I think that’s true!

Maybe now everyone’s had a drop in quantity of visual input they’ll think about ways of upping the quality?

Let’s hope so, we’ll see how it goes! That’s something that Jack talks about himself in the novel where he tries to get students to look more and look closer and look better and it would be nice if people did that. I take the train to work and on French trains there are blinds, and people pull the blinds down! I find that…

…Unforgiveable!

I know! I don’t understand it at all so the book is an attempt to encourage people to keep the blinds up.

Can you tell us a bit about your career and how you came to write novels?

I have spent all of my adult life in art schools in one way or another. I studied Graphic Design, although I was never a graphic designer. I worked as an illustrator for a while. I did an MA in art-history and I started teaching fairly early on in Britain. I then moved to France and started teaching in France. I started writing just after moving to France, in 2003/2004 and I had my first piece published in 2005. I think the writing in English really came as a consequence of living in France and struggling with the French language and English became this space that I could feel comfortable with.

Like a linguistic refuge? Did you speak any French at all before you went to France?

Yes, I did. But when you’re working you then you realise the enormity of the task, you realise how much you don’t know! I think I still struggle, after 20 years. I live with an English person and I work with, oddly, I happen to work with a lot of English speaking colleagues, which doesn’t help. French has always been a bit of a struggle for me.

But it helped you develop your English?

Very much so, yes. It gives you an awareness of how a language functions and I went to school in the 70s when we didn’t do anything to do with grammar, and very little to do with punctuation. It was a huge learning curve for me to properly learn a language.

In a way, when you learn a second language you also re-learn your first language. 

Yes, certainly. And I was widening my vocabulary. You become aware of language in a way that you weren’t aware of it when living in your own country. On top of that you have the added benefit of learning culturally, learning about other writers for example. I would have probably written stuff had I stayed in Britain but I think it was more of an imperative in France, it became more important, I became more motivated to do it.

Your new book The Colours is steeped in art and visuals, was it a challenge to be writing about art?

It came fairly naturally to me, I don’t think I would have been able to write in any other way. That comes from the Art History background where you spend a long time writing about paintings. The issues begin when I stand and stare at things too long which means the pacing slows down quite a bit. I also felt I wanted to write a lot about the technical aspects of painting. And once the novel went to Rihannon, my editor, it needed to be pruned of those bits.

What sort of technical details?

Oh I had a whole scene, page after page of stretching canvases and working on two at the same time because the oil paints dry slowly so you need to work on several paintings at the same time. Or mixing paint: what sort of surface do you mix paint on? I have friends who use glass because it’s a very smooth surface to mix paint on and what colours do you want to mix and then again what paint brush sizes and diluting, how much do you dilute the paint? Do you want something watery, or more thick, even moving your body or moving your arm when you’re painting, depends very much on the quality of the thickness of the paint that you’re using. I had all this stuff!

I guess if you have such a sense for the technical intricacies and the really dense visual descriptions it must be easy to forget that there’s a plot!

I think that’s certainly true! I don’t know whether I should say this, but I didn’t plot the novel really, I just sort of started writing and let it develop in its own way. Obviously I got excited about long passages of description.

That’s where editors come in handy!

Exactly, and you’re always in that half way mode of thinking ‘yes well, they’re right’ and ‘aaaaarrghh!’.

But how will people understand how to stretch a canvas?!

Exactly! It feels important! To be fair my editor was very sensitive and it was always ‘if you want to’ or ‘if you think it’s a good idea’ and I think knowing that it was a bit loosely plotted it was a good idea to tighten some of those things up. They did slow things down quite a lot, so I’m happy with it.

Now our final question: Lockdown Literature, what are you reading right now?

Ok I am embarrassed about this…I’m in a writing mode at the moment. A lot of my reading happens on the train when I go to work. I have a 40 minute journey which is perfect for proper reading and I’ve missed that since the lockdown. I find it very difficult to read another novel at the same time as writing my own novel. I had a whole year of proper reading last year and up until the point when I started writing the novel.

And once you’re writing you steer totally clear of any other books?

Now I’ve got three novels by the side of my desk, which are like talismans for me. One of them is Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, just so good. And another is Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway, and Herta Müller’s The Appointment. And I dip into them, open a page randomly and read a passage. Sometimes I read a passage aloud, because it helps one understand the language or understand the structuring a bit better or the pacing or whatever.

Aha, they’re your literary muses!

They’re my muses! And I also noticed, I have Atonement by McEwan, which is the period that I’m dealing with, which is why it’s sitting on the desk. I’m also in the process of reading a biography of Oswold Mosley which is called Black Shirt: Oswold Mosley and British Fascism, and it’s by Steven Dorril.

Oh a nice bit of light bedtime reading…

Oh yes, the intricacies of British government in the 1920s and 30s…

That’d send anyone to sleep!

I can do about two or three pages at a time! It gets a bit more racy when he moves onto Mosley’s affairs but it’s pretty dense stuff. And that is research for the book which I’m trying to write, for which I manage a paragraph a day at the moment. 

Another book set in the first half of the 20th century then?

The 20th century is the place I want to be, so it’s another 20th century novel. I vowed I would not do what I did with The Colours which caused me a bit of trouble which was dealing with such a long period of time because that caused me difficulty with pacing. So this novel is set in a single year, 1936.

Would you only write about the first half of the 20th century?

Well or the second half, but it would always have to be before I was born. As soon as it gets to the point where I was born I can’t handle it. Contemporary life: I can’t handle it! I don’t want to be the subject of my own novel so it always has to be before. I think it’s about trying to work out where you come from, what’s the world you came out of?


Thanks very much to Juliet for talking to us, and the ongoing pleasure of being her literary agents. The Colours is out now on Fleet Reads. Interview edited for clarity.

Singapore Writers Festival

Inaugurated in 1986, the Singapore Writers Festival celebrates South East Asian literary talent as well as bringing together writers, speakers, and delegates from all over the world.  

Artellus director Leslie Gardner made the trip across the globe to attend workshops on Science Fiction, hear talks by Roxane Gay and Marlon James, and buy more books than she should have...


The week-long writers festival was packed with great talks and vividly attentive participants. All was spread out among three venues: The Arts House at the Old Parliament Building, the National Gallery of Singapore (a staggeringly innovative architectural gem), and the basement of the Asian Cultures Museum – across the bay from colonial reminders of earlier times, Raffles Hotel and the Fullerton Hotel – formerly Post Office for the nation. The festival could not have been placed in a better spot in this tropical city-state replete with food stalls and shopping malls.

Before the festival however, a quick visit to the big Japanese owned bookstore Kinokuniya in the Takoshima Mall on Orchard Road, where I picked up all the brochures required. It’s also a great spot to buy and browse for books in Asian languages and English – they pushed and supported the festival with great promotional skill, and had extensive information on the festival and Singapore’s local writers.

Onto the Festival proper… My interest in Science and Speculative Fiction was evidently shared. Impressive numbers attended talks on things such as ‘The Future of Science Fiction’, ‘Chatbox and fiction’, or ‘Invisible Cities, Memory and Fiction’. There were workshops with enthusiastic participants such as ‘Postcolonial Criticism and Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction’. The big questions were tackled with gusto: how the future would look, the impact of video games on plot and character, and what’s science and technology got to do with fiction? All in the presence of such writers as Boey MeiHan who writes Science Fiction in all-women and all-Asian universes, and the veteran writer, Pang Hee Juon.

The dilemmas all science/speculative fiction writers wrangle with were reworked, and refreshed at the same time. These workshops and talks about Science Fiction – and the carefully distinguished ‘Speculative’ fiction – dominated the schedule and were rightfully jam-packed. The excellent attendance did not preclude fun individual encounters, including one memorable talk in the corridor with Malaysian Science Fiction writer Ahmad Patria Abdullah about his rather more traditional view of Science Fiction. A genre that, in his view, should be founded not only in the time the novel is written but also bounded by technology of the time. In vain I advocated for Science Fiction having actually contributed ideas to real-life scientists! Technology and aliens are what we make of them…

Of course the crime novel is my other personal passion. I walked away with bags of crime books by local Singaporeans. One author, Nick Humphreys, was sitting at the table signing his books. I purchased Marina Bay Sins, the first in a dark satirical detective series set in his native Singapore and published by Marshall Cavendish. And then, well, I purchased Daren Goh’s ‘The HDB Murders’ (also set in Singapore) published by the local branch of publishing house Math Paper Press. These texts are a great way to get to know the seedy sides of the place, which Singaporeans are eager to disclaim(!) In conclusion: my bags were much heavier on the return to London.

Back in the festival ‘Bad feminist’ Roxane Gay brought much laughter in her session, and Marlon James spoke – his speculative works are all on sale along with his Man Booker-winning novel, ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ – and essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer – both spoke to engaged audiences, admirers through and through.

As well as Singaporean branches of UK-based publishing, there are also those small local houses which for me are a great discovery. This is another indication of their seriousness in distributing into South-East Asia. There is a plethora of publishing houses in the city-state: Marshall Cavendish (SA branch), Penguin Random House (latest to the party in SA), and Math Paper Press, etc. There is still the ancient and noble tradition of publishing houses linking to bookstores, with the result of bookstores everywhere. Singapore dollars being reasonable value for my sterling-based budget, I bought a few more than planned (eek). The wonderful ‘Books Actually’ had a stand at the festival – we’d wandered its shelves already – and bought poetry published by their ‘ Math Paper Press’, which they run out of their backyard. The ‘Closetful of Books’ shop had a spread of local and international writers’ books that were irresistibly placed right at the entrance to the festival; Temptation was everywhere.

Organised and financed (alongside income from tickets) by the National Arts Council, the festival brings together multiple languages: English, Slinglish, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil among others. The mix of cultures is a core value in Singapore – and it is reflected in the literature. The festival was a celebration of global literary talent, billing the likes of home grown Singaporean writer and poet, Rex Shelley, (author of the classic The Shrimp People) alongside Canadian, Jamaican, British, and umpteen other nationality writers and speakers.

It was an atmospheric festival figuratively and literally: peppered with sporadic claps of thunder and lightning, the heavy tropical heat outside which meant hustling from one venue to another to be blissfully alleviated by air conditioning. I left with a head full of ideas, an armful of books and every intention of returning next year.

 

Noireland Festival: Belfast

Friday 8th - Sunday 10th of March 2019 saw Belfast host NOIRELAND, a new International Crime Fiction Festival. The three day festival celebrated all things crime with panels, workshops, and talks. 

Artellus director Leslie Gardner was in attendance. Here she reports from the bustling festival in mid-Brexit Belfast.

Leslie writes...

A day in Belfast for The Noireland International Crime Festival. Decades after my first visit, it was an entirely refreshing occasion and a changed city. Last time when I was attached to the BBC Radio Drama Department police were everywhere on the streets, and you were constantly frisked. No photos then or your film would be confiscated – this time: sweetness and light, friendly locals, and I took a slew of pictures.

The organisers, like good detectives, had left no stone un-turned when it came to content: True Crime, the role of mothers in crime, the Victim Point of View, and talks from top crime writers like Stuart MacBride and Belfast’s very own Adrian McKinty (a revelation – as smart and funny as his main protagonist Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop in a Protestant town when the Troubles were still in the air). The evening only built on the successes of the day– Gothic crime, social media crime, ‘outside’ crime, a rageful Brexit panel … and at the end of each event we were (quite rightly!) exhorted to go drink-up and buy their books.

Karen Sullivan, founder/editor Orenda Books was in attendance and particularly entertaining, cheering on various authors in the panels on her list. Seasoned readers, practising new crime writers, and published authors peppered the panels with questions. Attempts to hold down the rabble rousing in the Brexit meeting, and a pitch to create a viral event when two panellists threatened to get into a fight, were the tamer parts of the discussions.

The day was as relentless as the reading experience of these crime stories – dark and tough for the most part. No ‘cosies’ here! Darkened rooms, spotlit panellists, and no time to eat contributed to a dynamic and intense day. The quality of the talent and content on offer made it all worthwhile.

Adam Hamday’s scary explorations of the crimes on the internet caused many parents to think of denying their children smartphones.

Take, for example, Alex Reeve’s exploration of historical transgender issues in his crime novel. Set in a remote corner of the Scandinavian forests, the deaf and transgender Will Dean must hide who they are to escape being hanged as a murderer. Claire Allan’s ‘dark domestic noir’ is perhaps a new genre unto itself – and the involvement of children adds a new level of tough. Adam Hamday’s scary explorations of the crimes on the internet caused many parents to think of denying their children smartphones.

Brian McGilloway, Martyn Waites, and Declan Hughes warn us of the changing nature of crime with advent of Brexit (of which they are deeply critical). The current political dramas may be notable for their presence in the press, but for their absence in their novels; domestic and familial crimes instead of international thrillers and crime stories will prevail they determined… escapism. Spooky crime stories like Laura Purcell’s increasingly introduce the Gothic supernatural into the genre. In the process they supplanting traditional thriller themes, making it all much more up close and personal.

Throughout the day there were constant references to the trusted friends their editors had become in the writing process. Indications that agents were dampening (yet necessary) while editors more receptive. Once I’d had my fill I left those still standing to their drink and late-night final event of the day, listening to John Connolly’s new one. I trekked across town to my hotel behind Belfast Cathedral, thoroughly satisfied at the good talk and company. Here’s hoping Noireland Crime Fiction Festival proves to be a repeat offender⬛️