The Arvon Book of Life Writing: Writing biography, autobiography and memoir
About this ebook
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.
No other book contains such detailed, witty and professional advice on the genre.
About the author
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. She has edited several books of refugee writing, 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 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. Sally 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. Both Carole and Sally work as one-to-one mentors with emerging writers.
