Kester Brewin

Category: Writing

  • New Book

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    Delighted to announce that I’ve been awarded a grant from Arts Council England to work on my next book.  Following a 20 page application about artistic quality, and with supporting letters from some senior (and lovely) people in publishing, the award feels like a massive endorsement of the work I’ve done so far. The money…

  • Getting High…in 1753 | The Gin Craze

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    ‘In all history there’s never been a culture in the world that didn’t have some drug of some kind to lift people out of themselves.’ Poverty, war, terrifying religion and women experiencing liberation… Could so equally have written Getting High about the Gin craze era of the mid 1700s 🙂 In Our Time, brilliant, as…

  • ‘The focus on maths and science doesn’t add up. The arts must be in the equation’

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    I’ve a new opinion piece in The Guardian, arguing that the UK government’s obsession with high performance in Maths and Science is misplaced, and that squeezing out the arts is hugely short-sighted, especially given the long-standing strength of our creative industries. 

  • Avoiding Burnout

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    I wrote a piece for The Guardian a few weeks back, looking at the (major) issue of teacher burnout. Strikes me that it could resonate more widely into other professions too…especially ‘pastoral’ ones.  Panic attacks, tears, anxiety and breakdown are sadly too common across the nation’s staff rooms, and as governments demand more and more…

  • Getting High – A Reader’s Guide

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    For those of you who have already begun the book, or are awaiting delivery, I thought it might be helpful to post a kind of field-guide to the text. That’s not to say — I hope — that it doesn’t stand alone, but for those who are interested in delving into some of the background…

  • Don’t Tread Softly (Though You Tread on My Dreams)

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    It’s always a strange time in the run up to a book being published. Mostly, there’s a sense of excitement. But there’s also a degree of nervousness. Will people ‘get it’? Will people think it’s any good? I was thinking about this the other day, and was reminded of Yeats’ poem The Cloths of Heaven:…