Life Writing: A Writers' and Artists' Companion

Description

Life Writing: A Writers' & Artists' Companion is an essential guide to writing biography, autobiography and memoir. PART 1 explores the history and forms of life writing and the challenges and potential pitfalls of the genre. PART 2 includes tips by bestselling writers: Diana Athill, Alan Bennett, Alain de Botton, Jill Dawson, Millicent Dillon, Margaret Drabble, Geoff Dyer, Victoria Glendinning, Lyndall Gordon, Peter Hayter, Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Kathryn Hughes, Diane Johnson, Hermione Lee, Andrew Lownie, Janet Malcolm, Alexander Masters, Nancy Milford, Blake Morrison, Andrew Morton, Clare Mulley, Jenni Murray, Nicholas Murray, Kristina Olsson, Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Meryle Secrest, Miranda Seymour, Frances Spalding, Hilary Spurling, Boyd Tonkin, Edmund White. PART 3 includes practical advice - from planning, researching and interviewing to writing, pacing and navigating ethical issues.

Sally Cline award-winning biographer, short story writer and winner of the BBC short story contest, is the author of ten books, including ground-breaking biographies of Radclyffe Hall, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund and a judge and mentor for the Arts Council Escalator scheme. She has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Anglia Ruskin University, where she is Writer in Residence and a mentor on the MA in Creative Writing. Carole Angier is the biographer of Jean Rhys: Life & Work (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and winner of a Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award) and The Double Bond: A Life of Primo Levi. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She has edited several books of refugee writing, and teaches life writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.

Fascinating, wide-ranging, hugely knowledgeable - an indispensable guide and a beguiling education * William Boyd * For anyone who has ever read a biography or memoir, or thought of writing one - this book of advice from the best writers in the UK is an instant classic * Elaine Showalter, July 2010 * a useful and level-headed primer * Literary Review (September 2010) *