This will be my busiest summer for many years.

I’ll be teaching creative-writing courses here at our house, which is something I’m really looking forward to. Bookarmy have just run a nice article about my course, The French Workshop, and there’s a news piece on the Faber blog too. I also wrote an article about the importance of daydreaming for the London Writers’ Club.

Possibly even more excitingly, I’ve been given the job of translating a brilliant French novel: HHhH by Laurent Binet. It’s the (true) story of Operation Anthropoid, in which two Czechoslovak parachutists assassinated the prominent Nazi, Reinhard Heydrich. But it’s also a funny, moving, original meditation on life, truth, art, history and heroism. The English version will be published in 2012 by Farrar Straus Giroux in the States and by Harvill Secker in the UK. I’m thrilled to be doing it.

Finally, I went to Bordeaux a few weeks ago where I took part in a really enjoyable event at the Librairie Georges in Talence, in which actor Alain Chaniot read out parts of Une île au bout du monde, the French translation of my third novel The Island at the End of the World. He did it wonderfully. The next day, I went to Mollat, the biggest independent bookshop in France, and made a short video in which I had to talk about that book. For two minutes. Uninterrupted. In French. Oh well… I did my best. Shame I kept forgetting the names of my characters…