Book description
Fascinating, wide-ranging, hugely knowledgeable - an indispensable
guide and a beguiling education William Boyd Packed with insights and
advice - just the inspiration to start writing! Jenny Uglow Everyone has
a story. This book shows how the best writers tell them, and offers
advice on how to tell them yourself. Biographers Sally Cline and Carole
Angier teach life writing - an area of creative writing that is
exploding in popularity - at the world-famous Arvon Foundation. They
have distilled the essence of their popular course on memoir,
autobiography and biography into this wide-ranging book. The Arvon Book
of Life Writing offers three fascinating ways into the genre. First,
reflections on their trade by the authors, exploring its special
challenges: truth, memory, ethics, evidence and interpretation. Second,
personal tips and tales from 32 top British and American life writers -
autobiographers and memoirists, literary, sports and celebrity
biographers; plus a critic, an agent, a literary editor, two novelists,
and a ghost writer. Third, a practical guide, complete with exercises,
designed for use in creative writing courses or by individual writers at
home. Carole Angier is the biographer of Jean Rhys (shortlisted for
the Whitbread Prize and winner of a Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award)
and Primo Levi. She is a regular critic for The Independent, The
Spectator and The Literary Review, a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature, and teaches life writing at Birkbeck College, London
University. Sally Cline, award-winning biographer, short story writer
and winner of the BBC short story contest, is the author of nine 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. Both work
Carole and Sally work as one-to-one mentors with emerging writers.
