Lawrence Osborne is a novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter.
They passed into the harbour of Favignana at the beginning of spring, the island’s single small mountain heaving into view from the Trapani ferry, burned brown by centuries of parch and abandonment. A disused Bourbon castle sprawled upon its summit, while below it near the water stood an old tuna-processing factory with 19th-century industrial chimneys.
Someone somewhere must surely have calculated that Bangkok has more doctors and tailors per capita than anywhere on Earth. These two industries, healthcare and clothing, must account for a prodigious share of tourist revenues, and they both operate on similar principles: make the customer feel pleasant even as the results disappoint. It’s a formidable business
For 12 years now I have been learning Thai from my maid, Pi Nong, who has been employed in our building for decades. It’s a much misunderstood relationship. Here the maid is an obligatory fixture, integrated into daily life for foreigners and Thais over the age of 45 and over a fairly modest income level.
Many of my friends, stranded by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, have temporarily given up their film projects and settled down to write that hopeless novel which they could never finish before. Those film projects were more alluring – more necessary – than the lingering novels because they at least held out the prospect
The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle Rodriguez and a group of her friends, courtesy of the Mongolian-American conservationist Jalsa Urubshurow. Driving out of Ulaanbaatar at dawn, we stopped at a market on the outskirts of the city to buy caviar, blinis
I moved to Bangkok ten years ago in order to be in a place where nothing happens, where no one knew me and where nothing cost very much. A decade on, after a military coup, running street battles between protestors and soldiers, a ceaseless social life and costs reaching about the same levels as Brooklyn,
When the late-night talk-show host James Corden asked Barack Obama about UFOs last month, there was as usual an air of nervous joviality surrounding the subject. Bandleader Reggie Watts pressed him as well and Obama, as if relenting, admitted two things. Firstly, that he could not divulge all that he knew on air; and secondly,
There is a moment in the Jung brothers’ 2007 ghost film, Epitaph, when a young doctor in wartime Korea realises that the wife he adores does not have a shadow. He is entertaining her with a shadow puppet show in their home when he notices the aberration. ‘Walk to me,’ he says as he waves
Three years ago I sat down to write a novel set in my adopted home city. Placing its claustrophobic action in the near future, I had no trouble imagining my mostly foreign characters haplessly trapped inside a decaying high-rise apartment complex and surrounded by political upheaval. Thailand has endured more military coups since 1945 than
The Premio Rezzori literary prize — held every May in Florence — is named after the Austrian writer Gregor von Rezzori, who lived for years in the small village of Donnini, east of the city, with his aristocratic wife, Beatrice Monte della Corte. Von Rezzori died some years ago but his formidable wife, now 92,
The scene of the recent bombing at the Erawan shrine has swiftly been remodelled to make it seem as though nothing happened. Upbeat slogans – ‘Stronger Together’ – and a forensically dubious ‘clean-up’ have gone hand in hand with a media campaign to reassure millions of tourists that they are safe in the Land of Smiles.
