Steven Herrick's Blog

I���m writing this camped beside Lake Boga in Victoria, after cycling around the lake, smiling at the turtles on the rocks and admiring the cascades of gazanias ringing the bike path.

I should be holding up my new book, ���How to Repaint a Life��� in front of hundreds of school students, but ��� you know the story. I���ve seen school tours of Victoria and South Australia to promote the book disappear in a haze of rising case numbers and continuing (necessary) lockdowns. I���m not complaining - th...

I’m writing this camped beside Lake Boga in Victoria, after cycling around the lake, smiling at the turtles on the rocks and admiring the cascades of gazanias ringing the bike path.

I should be holding up my new book, ‘How to Repaint a Life’ in front of hundreds of school students, but … you know the story. I’ve seen school tours of Victoria and South Australia to promote the book disappear in a haze of rising case numbers and continuing (necessary) lockdowns. I’m not complaining - there are many...

I borrowed 'My brother Jack' from the library as a teenager and my world changed. It spoke to me about being an Australian, whatever that was. It was the first book I'd read that alerted me to the power of literature. Without being immediately aware, it rescued me from my likely career choices - storeman, truck driver or bank clerk. My best friend at the time was forming a band, perhaps like all young musicians hoping to write a song that changed the world. I compared 'My brother Jack'...

I borrowed 'My brother Jack' from the library as a teenager and my world changed. It spoke to me about being an Australian, whatever that was. It was the first book I'd read that alerted me to the power of literature. Without being immediately aware, it rescued me from my likely career choices - storeman, truck driver or bank clerk. My best friend at the time was forming a band, perhaps like all young musicians hoping to write a song that changed the world. I compared 'My brother Jack' t...

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Eleven years ago, we walked into a butcher shop in a small village in Tuscany and the man behind the counter offered us a free glass of red wine. Arranged near the displays of meat were bite-sized portions of bread smeared in lard. The butcher indicated for us to help ourselves. My wife and I stuffed our faces and drank a second glass of the red. Finally, perhaps thinking he’d never get rid of us, the butcher s...

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Fiction authors aren’t supposed to bother with statistics. We inhabit the world of character, emotion, myth and story, not sterile numbers and lists. We worship the image, the poetry of words, the craft of dialogue.And yet in the clanging echo chamber of Social Media, one statistic keeps tolling through my feed - the number of women killed by their partners in Australia. Each week, the smiling face of a wife, m...

Every morning in my study before I pretend to be a writer and open my latest manuscript to begin work, I check the soccer scores on soccerway.com. It gives me strange comfort and satisfaction to learn that Albania beat Lichtenstein 2-0 in a World Cup qualifier. That Wales edged Austria 1 - 0 and that Costa Rica won away from home against the USA. Like much of the football world (ie: most people on the planet), I'm shocked to learn that Italy have been thumped 3 - 0 by Spain. The shame!I...

‘Cycling South’ is my sixth travel ebook. All six books have followed my wobbling adventures across Europe on a bicycle, accompanied by my wife, Cathie and a hankering for quiet back lanes, long lunches and a desire to explore a remarkable continent. This final book charts our journey from The Highlands to the Islands - Scotland to Sardinia.I’m blessed to be able to combine my passions of travel, cycling and writing and somehow make a living out of it all. I’m even more fortunate that my beau...

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I’ve travelled in thirty-one countries in Europe and cycled extensively in eighteen of those and I’m here to say that in every measure that I value England is bottom of the barrel. I apologise to all my English friends. It's not you, it's me. Well, actually it's your country and some of its inhabitants. 
An Australian slagging off England is a cliche. But why do you suppose the English emigrate in droves to Spain, France, Greece ... even down-under rather than stay on their happy isle? Wh...