Adult Fiction

Short Stories

Many of Diana’s stories have been published in magazines and anthologies and read on BBC Radio 4.

My Father As An Ant & Other Stories (Postbox Press 2017)

                                                             A few copies left available direct from the author

Essays

Late Style

an essay based on the poems in Second Wind.    BBC Radio 3  26.4.17

Asking the right questions

an essay on being a cub reporter.

Royal Literary Fund online magazine Spring 2017

Poetic Science

a year spent in the Chemistry department of Edinburgh University.

Chemistry World.  Nov. 2009

Edward Arlington Robinson: a Poet's Life

By Scott Donaldson. The Dark Horse, Winter 2007/8

Halycon Days   (An Extract)  The Author, Spring 2011

          It begins when I get a job in the Literary Department of The Sunday Times. I’m shorthand-typist/secretary to the Assistant Literary Editor, J.W. Lambert and I have never been happier.  I’m happy without knowing it. I’m happy in the way you only recognise later when you’re not happy.

          I’m happy because I’m surrounded by books and because no-one minds me reading them and because for all of my 18 years I’ve been very short of books. I was sacked from my first job – an American oil company in Picadilly - for reading, so I’m not quite sure how I’ve landed this one at The Sunday Times.     

          At first I’m still so jumpy about reading, that I’m constantly poised to hide my book under the desk.  Then Jack Lambert blows in, gives me a ‘good morning’ and clearly thinks it’s the most natural thing in the world to find someone reading.  And so does the assistant Assistant Literary Editor, Michael Ratcliffe, who is not much older than me and therefore eligible only his hair’s rather lank and his waistcoat’s too tight. I can’t place him on any social scale that I recognise except I think he’s a Cambridge grad which puts him right beyond my ken. I’m almost engaged to G but still very alert to eligibility. Though like much else, I’ve got this badly wrong because Michael is gay.

          Actually everyone here is socially beyond my ken.  That’s because I’m bourgeois to the rubber tips of my high heels and I’ve never known the likes of this lot.  My parents - plumber’s son, tailor’s daughter -  are working class people who have climbed gauchely into the middle class on the money ladder. We haven’t two cents of culture to rub together.