February 2016

East life
Illustration: Lucinda Rogers
The Gentle Author, writer and creator of Spitalfields Life,
talks to Christine Preisig and Julie Daniels
For more than seven years, and without missing
a single day, the Gentle Author – for that is the
name he prefers – has written a daily story on his
blog Spitalfields Life about the people and culture
of the East End. There, he describes his "harebrained"
promise to write 10,000 stories about
Spitalfields, which has grown to cover a much
wider area of the East End. He affectionately
depicts local people and places, and by doing
so has become a celebrated diarist and cultural
historian of our time.
The project has a deeply personal motivation.
After his father died, the Gentle Author moved
back to his childhood home in Devon to look after
his mother who suffered from dementia. During
the six years he lived with her until her death he
was rarely able to leave the house. He couldn’t
have done this, he says, without the help of some
amazing people.
It was something that altered his view of life and
made him realise just how extraordinary it is to
be in the world. He had had a successful career
as a writer, but from that point on he wanted to
write in a different way. For one thing, he wished
to express himself in an unmediated way, with no
gatekeeper between him and the reader.
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