by Maggie Ling | Sep 6, 2024 | Human Rights, Politics, Women’s Rights
A child early to walking and talking and, it could be said, early to finding my writer’s voice, in that I wrote my first short story collection when I was five or six – see On the Shelf podcast – my need to express myself creatively has continued throughout my life,...
by Maggie Ling | Jul 5, 2024 | Climate, Racism, Refugees
I had hoped to write this if not before then during Refugee Week, which the UNHCR package I received prior to it, informed me was June 17-23, but family commitments prevented me from doing so. Though I did display the enclosed poster on my sitting-room window, were it...
by Maggie Ling | Feb 15, 2024 | Health, Politics, War
Last year brought 75th birthday ‘celebrations’ for the NHS, the state of Israel, and for me. The last British troops left Haifa four days after I almost killed my mother, the home-birth of her second child suddenly a medical emergency, our hospital discharge coming a...
by Maggie Ling | Jan 10, 2023 | Politics, Women’s Rights
Christmas almost upon us, the cold snap coming to an end, shopping for spices in the fabulous market of this fine city, the friendly stallholder asked me how I was. A dangerous question to a writer partial to telling it like it is. A bit down, I answered… voice...
by Maggie Ling | Nov 30, 2022 | Politics, Women’s Rights
While football-crazy folks spend large amounts of money flying to Doha to watch super-rich footballers kick a ball about a stadium (built by poor immigrant workers, some dying in the process), I’d like to take you back to the Qatari capital and February 29th 2020....
by Maggie Ling | Aug 15, 2022 | History, Politics
There’s a girl, her curly ginger hair pulled to one side with a turquoise slide, wailing in the cloakroom, tears trailing down her freckled flushed cheeks. Beyond distraught, she’s on the verge of hysteria. A year older, having clocked up my fourteenth year that May,...
by Maggie Ling | Apr 22, 2022 | COVID, Politics
Lies, damned lies and statistics. For some reason, these words came into my mind, and since, politically-speaking, they summed up January 2022, they are the theme for this blog. The full phrase, There are three kinds of lies – lies, damned lies and statistics, was...
by Maggie Ling | Jan 1, 2022 | BBC Short Story, Writing
In my previous incarnation as a cartoonist and illustrator, back in those days of editorial demands and demanding deadlines, come December, another self-imposed deadline would be added to the Must Do list ahead of Christmas: the all-important Christmas card – a...
by Maggie Ling | Nov 29, 2021 | Creativity, Writing
If success can be judged by being placed in competition with other writers, then Running Away is one of my successful stories. Written in 2011, sent out into the competitive world of international short story competitions in 2012, it was placed on two longlists,...
by Maggie Ling | Nov 1, 2021 | Writing
I have never been someone for whom an annual holiday is a quintessential part of life. This may be due, in part, to my childhood experience of that getting-away-from-it-all word: a working-class background that meant, until the age of twelve, family away-days and a...
