Faber & Faber

Friday 5 to Sunday 7 March 2010

Jaffé & Neale Bookshop
1 Middle Row
Chipping Norton
Oxfordshire OX7 5NH

Course fees: £375 (price inclusive of VAT)

Inventing the Real: writing historical fiction and fiction about real people . . . A course which is a lively combination of discussion and writing exercises from two novelists who have both tackled the historical.

How does a novelist go about researching an historical period? What are the boundaries when you are writing about real historical figures? How is it possible to appropriate an age, or a personality that really existed?
 

Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring was an international success when it was published and made into film starring Scarlett Johannsen. Since then, she has tackled the poet William Blake in Burning Bright and Mary Anning and nineteenth-century fossil hunting in her most recent book, Remarkable Creatures. Two of Louise Doughty’s five novels have been historical – Stone Cradle was about her own family ancestry and set in rural England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fires in the Dark took on the vast subject of the Second World War and the Romany Holocaust.

Louise and Tracy will talk about the differences between writing historical and contemporary work, the problems of writing about your family history and large-scale, historical tragedy – and setting a series of writing exercises designed to illustrate the different ways in which we can all take the ‘real’, and make it ours in our novels.

The course will take place in the lovely Oxfordshire setting of Chipping Norton, in one of England’s most lively and praiseworthy independent bookshops, Jaffé & Neale, which we hope will both inspire and comfort aspiring writers in equal measure.

Maximum number of course places available: 15

The course includes:

•    Intensive tuition with Louise Doughty and a ½ day workshop by Tracy Chevalier
•    A complimentary Moleskine® Notebook
•    A beautiful daily artisan lunch
•    Regular coffee breaks
•    A Friday night reading in the bookshop by Louise Doughty and Tracy Chevalier followed by a glass of wine
•    A handy course pack including local hotel recommendations
•    A special discount off Faber books purchased at www.faber.co.uk

About the Tutors

Louise Doughty (www.louisedoughty.com) is the author of five novels – Crazy Paving, Dance With Me, Honey-Dew, Fires in the Dark and Stone Cradle. Crazy Paving was shortlisted for four awards including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Fires in the Dark won awards from the Arts Council and the K. Blundell Trust. She has also won awards for short stories and radio drama. She is the author of one work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her newspaper column of the same name, which drew tens of thousands of responses worldwide, and is a highly experienced teacher of creative writing. She was a judge for the 2008 MAN Booker Prize for Fiction and is working on her sixth novel. Her forthcoming novel, Whatever You Love, will be published by Faber in June 2010.

Tracy Chevalier (www.tchevalier.com) is the author of six novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, Burning Bright, and most recently, Remarkable Creatures. She grew up in Washington, DC and after university moved to London, where she lives with her husband and son. She worked in publishing for several years before doing an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, under the tutelage of Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. She has been Chair of the Society of Authors, and was Writer in Residence for York Art Gallery in 2008.

About Faber

Faber and Faber is the last of the great independent publishing houses in London. We were established in 1929 by Geoffrey Faber and our first editor was T. S. Eliot. Among our list of authors we are proud to publish five Booker Prize winners and eleven Nobel Laureates. We are particularly well-known for our unrivalled list of modern poets and playwrights, as well as for publishing writers of prize-winning fiction and general non-fiction. More

To make a booking:

Contact Patrick on either patrickk@faber.co.uk or +44 (0) 207 927 3822
Alternatively, write to Patrick Keogh, Faber and Faber, 74-77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA

Places are strictly limited, so book soon to avoid disappointment