Book description
After six novels, five story collections and two books of
non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A. L. Kennedy
certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing
books - it's just a wonder she's found the time. These are
missives from the authorial front line - urgent and vivid, full of the
excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words
into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the
hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian - and
we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one
collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in
between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they
need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and
publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom
conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of
our contemporary authors.
Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice,
writers' workshops and writers' health and the book ends with the
transcript of Kennedy's celebrated one-person show about writing and
language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read
together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class
imaginable from one of the finest - and most humane - writers in our language.
A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of
Granta
's Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards -
including the Costa Book of the Year. She lives in London and is a
part-time lecturer in creative writing at Warwick University.
