The UK prime minister in this story is a woman which in and of itself is nothing to complain about. Marc writes (main picture): I specifically focused on the South Africa captain Siya Kolisi, far left, as he sung the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, as he sings with so much passion and emotion. I think my style is old-school, in the sense that I care about grammar and punctuation, but I hope it’s clear, and unambiguous. I like short sentences, and I think both adjectives and adverbs should be used sparingly. Sometimes I work over sentences many, many times until I find a harmony between the words. As far as structure goes, I think of myself as a storyteller, and I like to take the reader from A to B without too many deviations. I work hard at my dialogue (which I love writing) and I hope it has energy and life.

The Translator by Harriet Crawley | Book review | The TLS

Because I could speak these languages, I was commissioned aged 18, to write a book about the student riots of 1968. The book, called A Degree of Defiance, was published in 1969 when I was 20. I also wrote several major feature articles for the Daily Mail about the 1968 student riots in Paris. I had my plot. I had my characters. I also had a love story. The two interpreters had worked together 15 years earlier in the UN; they had fallen in love, and were about to do so all over again. The genre would be ‘suspense fiction’, a term coined by the great Patricia Highsmith, and one I prefer to ‘thriller’.

Cupolas of St. Basil’s cathedral, Red Square (c) Harriet Crawley BookTrail the locations in The Translator Clive Franklin is a Russian language expert for the Foreign Office (UK) and he is on a sabbatical in the Highlands. In fact, he is at Lochleven, which coincidentally recently featured as a location in Peter May’s climate thriller A Winter Grave. I really enjoyed this classic spy thriller. It's fast-paced, and the plot is definitely solid. You can tell she has done a tremendous amount of research, and it reflects in her writing. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart. It was turned down by 42 publishers and in 2020 it won the Booker Prize.

The Translator by Harriet Crawley | Waterstones

Fast-paced political-cum-spy thriller with a chilling ring of authenticity and an eerie closeness to present events in Ukraine. Unputdownable.' Xan Smiley, The Economist The issue that most annoyed me was that the description of Russia & its behaviour involved no imagination at all. A chance remark here in London made everything fall in place: a former diplomat in Moscow told me, ‘At top level negotiations between heads of state, the interpreters are invisible. Non-people. But they see and hear everything.’ First and foremost, I wanted to be a writer. The crime/suspense element came later. My first novel, The Goddaughter was published by Weidenfeld in 1975. My second novel, The Lovers and The Loved was published by Heineman in 1990. These are straightforward novels, love stories.

The characters were well built through the novel and I found myself routing for Clive and Marina and thoroughly disliking General Varlamov. I love to ski. In London I play tennis a couple of times a week, and I’m still a big reader. I go to the theatre quite often, and I love inviting friends over to dinner. I always do the cooking, which I enjoy. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.