Author Archives: Jamie Jauncey

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About Jamie Jauncey

Author, writer, blogger, facilitator, musician, co-founder of Dark Angels and The Stories We Tell

Spell-binding

Extraordinary things happen on Dark Angels courses. That is because the people who come on them are extraordinary. In truth, everyone is extraordinary if only given the chance to be him or herself. And that is perhaps the most unfathomable … Continue reading

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The heart of things

Last month I was lucky enough to appear at two book festivals. One of them, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, is indisputably the world’s largest and this year was its best year ever, with a record 225,000 visits to Charlotte … Continue reading

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Treetops

I was three years old in 1952 when young Princess Elizabeth learnt of the death of her father, George VI. She was staying at Treetops Hotel in Kenya’s Aberdare National Park. Jim Corbett, the famous white hunter, later charmingly wrote: … Continue reading

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Waking up

Last year at the Edinburgh International Book Festival I chaired Michael Ondaatje as he talked about his latest novel, The Cat’s Table, a fictionalised account of the journey he had made as an 11-year-old in a passenger liner, from Ceylon … Continue reading

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Falling in love

‘Grecia no!’ A border policemen lifts his chin in that peculiarly dismissive way the Greeks have of signifying a negative – in this case that there is something wrong with the bewildered Italian backpacker’s passport and he’s not going to be … Continue reading

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Swedish angels

Something extraordinary happens on Dark Angels courses. People who don’t even think of themselves as writers discover that the simplest of words have a power to connect beyond their wildest imaginings. And the connections they make are not only with … Continue reading

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On the road

In 1967, my last year at school, I discovered that there was a bursary for classicists to travel to Greece. It was one of those things that no one told you about but I got wind of it somehow and … Continue reading

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Olympic virtues

On Radio 4 recently, Clifford Longley, the BBC’s religious affairs correspondent, quoted Bob Diamond’s notorious comment that business culture was ‘how people behave when no one’s watching’. Longley went on to draw the distinction between the self-interest that governs so … Continue reading

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Strange fruit

Tomorrow I leave for France for 10 days. This is a holiday that feels like it’s been a long time coming. The year so far has been one of hard domestic slog, clearing out my mother’s house in Kent and … Continue reading

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Connection men

In Russell Hoban’s extraordinary post-nuclear novel Riddley Walker, there are characters known as ‘connection men’, storytellers whose job it is to try and piece things together, reinforce the codes that bind their small communities, and at the same time make … Continue reading

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