- Susanna Clarke on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (from 2007)
- Jane Goldman on adapting Stardust for the big screen
- Judith Adams on adapting Susanna Clarke’s Mrs Mabb for BBC Radio
Latest News
2026
- Susanna Clarke’s new short story, The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, is available for pre-order now at Bloomsbury Publishing and at Amazon.co.uk (Kindle, Hardback and Audiobook) and will be available to buy from October 20th, 2026.
About this page/FoEM
Around 2004 or 2005, I started a blog (The Friends of English Magic) dedicated to Susanna Clarke’s wonderful debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. While working for the Academy Award-, BAFTA-, and Emmy-winning visual effects company MPC, I found the courage to reach out to Susanna’s publishers, partner (Colin Greenland), and others to secure permission and email interviews for the blog.
It was all quite extraordinary, and I’m profoundly grateful to Susanna, Colin, Curtis Brown, and Bloomsbury Publishing, as well as Peter Harness, Jane Goldman, Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess, and Judith Adams, for all their help. I also thank Ileen Maisel, formerly of New Line Cinema, who, to my very great surprise, responded to my initial enquiry about the film (which, obviously, eventually became a TV series after changing hands).
The Friends of English Magic also led me to produce two video interviews with Stonewylde author Kit Berry – but alas, due to circumstances beyond my control, the original YouTube videos were lost, and the interviews remain on mini DV tape awaiting re-transcoding. Kit (real name Kirsten Espensen) very sadly passed away on October 29th, 2021.
I may bring back FoEM one day (it took me several years to wrestle the domain back), but as a busy systems administrator for a very busy London university, I have little time for anything else right now. If you want to see what FoEM looked like back in the day, start here via the Wayback Machine.
Speaking of which, I miss the original jonathanstrange.com website. The bare domain only returns a Page Not Found on Bloomsbury’s site. But back in its heyday, it was rather good. You can still visit it via the Wayback Machine.