Southerly

Alex Ferguson is an experienced writer successful in radio, television and radio. His Radio Four series My Uncle Freddie ran for six seasons and in 1997 won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Comedy & Light Entertainment. Alex is the founding writer of Corin & Vanessa Redgrave’s Moving Theatre with successful productions of his plays The Flag and Casement at Battersea Lane and the Riverside. In 1997 Alex won the Guinness National Award for Pub Theatre with Big Mama. In 2004 he won a regional Royal Television Society nomination for the short film Lads and was selected for the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum at the Screenlit Festival in April 2010 with Painting Over The Cracks. Alex has a commendable history in radio & television drama and was the Creative Director of the Bold as Brass Theatre Company that he founded in 1997 until 2008 when he became Life President. His collection of short stories, My Uncle Freddie [2004] and Uncle Freddie & The Prince Of Wales [2010] are available from Iron Press, Cullercoats, Northumberland. His first venture into juvenile fiction, the spooky story, Tiggie, is published by AuthorHouse and is available on Amazon.

The collection ‘Fariground Magician’ brings together stories about love fulfilled and unfulfilled, about things that are visible in the everyday world and values that are perceptible only at exceptional moments. The narration moves from apparent realism to other genres, such as crime fiction, the thriller and erotic prose. Memories, intimations, and premonitions are infused in these stories with a tranquillity that accepts what fate brings, even when, as in the stories Pockets Full of Stones or Nosedive, efforts are made to change it. Lengold uses eroticism as a natural ingredient of human life, as an integrated tension consisting of two inseparable aspects – body and soul – energising stories like Love Me Tender, Fairground Magician, Zugzwang, Wanderings, and Aurora Borealis. In Fairground Magician, Lengold is a lucid observer of minute details and subtle emotional shifts. In stories like It Could Have Been Me, Shadow, or Ophelia, Get Thee to a Nunnery, she manages to leap over the wall between the bodily surface and the human interior in a very distinctive way. No matter how common the situations she depicts – whether it be broken marriages, unfulfilled expectations, or the motives of forlorn lovers – Lengold is constantly searching for the authentic, finding it within the sophisticated irony which is a trademark of her fiction.