Writing Lives
Life writing is thriving, becoming perhaps the broadest and most exciting literary genre of our times. Spend a week discovering how you can work within the form to tell your story of a life.
Level
What do these levels mean?
Location
Length
How do we write about a life?
From bestsellers by doctors and lawyers to Norwegian experiments in autofiction, the genre of life writing is bigger and broader than ever. This course will look at the many and diverse ways you can write about your life or other people's. For example, how truthful can/should you be in presenting yourself in your writing? Should you treat yourself or others as a fictional construct? To what extent can you yourself enter into the telling of another person's life?
These questions are formal as well as ethical and wide open to interpretation. Drawing on a comprehensive reading list, and putting these ideas into practice in a series of writing exercises, we will spend the week discussing and deciding on the most suitable way for you to write into this newly re-energised and vibrant form of literature.
Is this the right course for me?
Whether you're looking to write about your own life or someone else's, this course will explore the many possibilities the genre has to offer. You don't need to have taken any courses before but the course is also not designed for complete beginners and is best suited to students who have experimented with some form of writing before.
This course runs for five days, from 10.00–16.00. Each day will be divided into two sessions: in the morning, the day’s theme will be introduced and then discussed as a group, followed by a writing exercise. There will be an hour’s lunch break at 13.00, followed by a second, related writing exercise and a final group discussion to end.
Course Programme
Session 1
Monday 3 February 2025, 10.00–16.00
Non-fiction: Writing about the sel...
Session 2
Tuesday 4 February, 10.00–16.00
Non-fiction: Writing about others...
Session 3
Wednesday 5 February, 10.00–16.00
Guest Tutor...
Tutors
Richard Skinner
Richard Skinner is a novelist, poet and critic. His most recent book, The Mirror, was described as ‘beautifully written...
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