Cull and Co. Ltd Behind the Book

Behind the Book: SEASON by George Harrison

I figured, when I started work on Season, that since I spend so much time watching football, thinking about football, and talking about football, I may as well start writing about it too. I’ve supported Norwich City since I was a boy, and two decades of delight and despair have naturally left me with a vast repository of memories and impressions to draw upon. I’m wary of trite and inflexible ‘rules’ around writing, but there is something to be said for writing what you know, and I know what it means to be a football fan.

Season was not my first attempt at writing a novel. By the time I started on the book which would become my debut, I had already drafted and discarded four or five full-length manuscripts. None of them were good enough to be published, but the process of composing and editing them taught me a lot and made me a more thoughtful writer.

With Season, the first thing I did was settle on a structure. What about a novel, I thought, which takes place over the thirty-eight games of a Premier League season, with a chapter for each match? This formal framework gave me a skeleton around which I could neatly build the narrative, which I wanted to ground in the match-day experiences of football supporters rather than focussing too much on the events of the pitch. I thought writing about two men at different life stages would help me say something about the universality of the fan experience and football’s ability to bridge social gaps, and this led naturally to the unnamed Old Man and Young Man at the heart of the novel and the friendship which develops very slowly between them.

The first draft of Season was very different from the version published by Eye Books in 2025. Season had initially emerged as a short and self-conscious novella, which (I think) did a good job of capturing the mood and the spirit of the terraces but only skimmed the surface of everything else. Thankfully, this draft still had enough about it to win me an Escalator New Writer Fellowship at the National Centre for Writing. As part of the programme, I spent the best part of a year refining the manuscript under the mentorship of the novelist Michael Donkor.

The bones were already there, but Michael’s external perspective helped me get to grips with the guts of the story. I developed the characters, expanded the narrative, and teased out some themes which had previously been lurking just under the surface. But perhaps Michael’s best advice was to do with the book’s title.

I had been going with the clunkier and far less poetic Season Ticket, until Michael suggested I ‘drop the Ticket.’ Sometimes, in football, you know a shot is going in as soon as it leaves the striker’s boot, and this suggestion had the same feeling about it. In that moment, Season was born, and I knew then that I was on to a winner.

Season was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for best Debut Fiction, published by Lightning Books.

Cull and Co. Ltd Behind the Book

Behind the Book: SMALL EARTHQUAKES by Shafik Meghji

Some places feel like home even if you’ve never been there before. Buenos Aires was like that for me. I arrived at the end of my first visit to South America, a life-shifting backpacking trip through Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Chile and Argentina after giving up a job as a news and sports reporter for the Evening Standard. In some sense, part of me never left the city.

These travels cemented an interest in South America that developed in childhood from a disparate patchwork of sources. Growing up in South London, I was captivated by stories of the Amazon and the Inca Empire, by The Mysterious Cities of Gold cartoon, Willard Price’s Amazon Adventure and fleeting clips of Diego Maradona, Gabriel Batistuta and Carlos Valderrama. Later I devoured Michael Palin’s TV travelogues, David Attenborough’s documentaries, Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt and Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express.

My time in South America also prompted a change of career. I moved into travel writing and ultimately relocated to Buenos Aires for a year. There, I frequently came across fragments of British history and culture: the English-language Buenos Aires Herald newspaper, a shuttered Harrods store on the main shopping strip, the nearby Richmond café.

Close to my apartment in Villa Crespo were streets named ‘Thames’, ‘Darwin’ and ‘FitzRoy’. Farther afield, there were intriguingly titled suburbs, towns and cities (‘Hurlingham’, ‘William C. Morris’) and football clubs (‘River Plate’, ‘Newell’s Old Boys’).

The Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego
The Beagle Channel in Tierra del Fuego

I came across British schools, polo clubs and rugby teams, as well as a Welsh-Argentine community in Patagonia. It soon became apparent that Britain and Argentina’s links ran far deeper than simply conflicts in the South Atlantic and rivalries on the football pitch.

These experiences were echoed across the continent. Everywhere I went, I stumbled upon forgotten stories and unexpected connections between Britain and South America, a history I wasn’t taught about in school and didn’t see represented in the media or popular culture.

Crossed Off the MapAs I travelled across Bolivia to research my first book, Crossed Off the Map, I came across a graveyard of British-built trains on the edge of the world’s biggest salt flat, a notorious Amazonian rubber trader with a home in Hampstead, a tall tale about a British diplomat stripped naked, tied to an ass and kicked out of La Paz.

I read about Walter Raleigh’s search for El Dorado in what would become the British colony of Guyana, a land laboured by enslaved Africans and indentured South Asians; British soldiers who fought alongside Simón Bolívar in the continent’s wars of independence; a town built by a British railway company in southern Brazil.

But the stories that most captured my imagination come from the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Travelling from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego, Easter Island to SouthGeorgia, I slowly unearthed a shared history spanning five centuries and featuring nitrate kings and wool barons, footballers and pirates, polar explorers and radical MPs, cowboys and missionaries.

A Welsh tearoom in Patagonia
A Welsh tearoom in Patagonia

From ghost towns in the desert to far-flung ranches in the sub-polar tundra. Rusting whaling stations in the South Atlantic to an isolated railway built by convicts. The southernmost city on the planet to a crumbling port known as the ‘Jewel of the Pacific’.

On the way, I learned about Britain’s enduring impact on Argentina, Chile and Uruguay – from sparking wars, forging national identities and redrawing borders to a tangled role in their colonisation and decolonisation – and how these countries have shaped Britain in profound and unexpected ways.

Eventually, after 10 years of writing and research, these places, characters and stories came together in Small Earthquakes.

Cull and Co. Ltd Behind the Book

Behind the Book: SANCTUARY by Tom Gaisford

Sanctuary was conceived in the arrivals queue at Stansted. It was my first time, and the whole thing was over in seconds.

“What if,” the muse whispered, “a refugee lawyer like you were to claim asylum in your own country?”

I closed my eyes and saw an immigration officer beckoning me forward. “No have pasaporte,” I told her, attempting a Hispanic accent. The officer sank into a trap room, the stage revolved, and in the middle distance I could make out the concertina wire and yellow brick walls of an immigration removal centre. I walked up to the door and opened it. The writing had begun.

Long before Sanctuary was published, I worked in immigration and asylum law at a top-ranked firm in Tottenham. There, I developed an indignant, sometimes self-righteous disdain for our government’s treatment of vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers. If we are the protagonists of our own lives, the Home Office was my antagonist. We fought them day in, day out on our clients’ behalf, essentially to protect basic human rights. It was rewarding, while also gruelling.

At first, the novel was a kind of escape: a way to explore that world through a playful, satirical, romantic lens. Later, the escape became something else. I began to see the book as a vehicle for taking readers into a legal and moral landscape, and not letting them leave unchanged.

Then, like any good villain, reality turned up to wreck my plot. In 2017, Callum Tulley blew the whistle on abuses at Brook House IRC. “It’s just like your story idea,” a friend told me, and my heart sank – for the victims, for all of us in whose name these places were being run, and for my fragile novel. I wrote faster, and made the crime at the heart of my story so heinous it couldn’t possibly happen in real life.

Life, of course, kept pace.

Working as a barrister left little time for writing, but the pandemic offered a strange window. By then my wife was working as a consultant paediatrician in Gibraltar, and we were living across the border in Spain with our two-year-old and her newborn sister. Time was still scarce, but I finished a draft. Then came Rwanda, and suddenly the parallels between policy and plot were impossible to ignore. A retired literary agent friend suggested I “hang fire” on submitting. Instead, I absorbed what was happening into the manuscript and kept going.

Sanctuary by Tom Gaisford

Somewhere in the middle I hit what publishing people call the dark night of the soul. Ten years had passed. I’d devoted an inordinate amount of thought to a book that still didn’t feel complete, and I couldn’t put my finger on why I’d been compelled to write it.

Reluctantly, I set the draft aside and began blueprinting another novel. It was only then that something clicked. I realised the tension I kept circling – freedom, responsibility, dignity, control – ran through my writing, and through me. I went back, gave the manuscript the inner story it had been crying out for, renamed it Sanctuary (its working title, The Muse and The Mole, had never suited it), and handed it over.

And here we are. The book is out in the world and I’m proud of her. I’d say we’re proud of her – only the muse speaks for herself.

Sanctuary (Cinto Press) is out now.