Research for a novel led Beatrice Colin to Argyllshire’s Benmore Gardens, and sparked a fascination with all things horticultural and with the Victorian plant hunters who first brought non-native species to Scotland.
For many years, Sally Cline has lived a ‘secret life’, spending summers away from her Cambridge home in Austin, Texas. But are her two lives so very different after all?
As the child of immigrants, Ray French knows what it’s like to have to shift between identities — and argues that this is no bad thing for a writer. He considers parallels between the Irish experience and that of other ethnic groups in Europe and America, and shows how this sense of difference has shaped his writing.
Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, captivated Cherise Saywell when she first read it at the age of twenty, offering insights into the postcolonial world which reflected her own experience as a young Australian writer.
When Lucinda Hawksley began researching her biography of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise, she didn’t expect to meet opposition from, amongst others, the Royal Archive. But requests for information here and elsewhere went unanswered — which only increased the author’s resolve to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her subject.
Re-reading the diaries she wrote during the early nineteen-nineties, when she taught English in Buenos Aires, Ruth Thomas found that – as well as details of day-today life – she’d recorded more about Argentina’s political upheavals than she remembered doing at the time.
Letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings… writers have always found inspiration in ephemera. Some have carried hoarding to excess, as Nicolette Jones explains.
The peripatetic history of the Golden Gospel – an eighth century illuminated manuscript – is pieced together by ‘historical detective’ Max Adams, following a trail of clues that lead from the Canterbury scriptorium where it was first created, to its present-day home in Stockholm.
Why do some writers choose to use a name other than the one they were born with for their writing? John Pilkington looks at some of the reasons why authors throughout history have adopted pseudonyms, and wonders if it has something to do with the need to reinvent oneself.
Generally associated with fortune-telling rather than story-telling, the Tarot can be a valuable asset to a writer, argues Diane Samuel, offering a range of archetypes and narrative possibilities which can help unlock the creative impulse.