Short Course – Fiction: Louis de Bernières & Tim Pears, Guest: The Bookshop Band

Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 16th Nov - Sun 19th Nov, 2017
1:00pm - 2:00pm

Location
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire , IV4 7HT

Writing character.

Although writers tend to work holistically, it can be helpful to isolate and examine some of the elements of our writing. In this course, novelists Louis de Bernières and Tim Pears will foreground the writing of character, emphasising the importance of such matters as dialogue and silence, action and inaction as means of revealing the inward workings of our characters’ minds. By focusing on this particular area of the writing process, as well as on the general need for precision and relevance, we shall arrive at a fuller understanding of the art and craft of fiction-writing.

On Saturday evening The Bookshop Band in the Straw Bale Studio.

Louis de Bernières, who lives in Norfolk, published his first novel in 1990 and was selected by Granta magazine as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. He is internationally recognized for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Novel in 1994. His other novels include the acclaimed Birds Without Wings (2004) and A Partisan’s Daughter (2008), which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. A collection of short stories, Notwithstanding: Stories from an English Village, was published in 2009, followed by his first collection of poetry, Imagining Alexandria: Poems in Memory of Constantinos Cavafis, in 2013. His major new novel The Dust That Falls From Dreams was published in 2015 and became a Sunday Times bestseller. As well as writing, he plays the flute, mandolin and guitar.

Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon and left school at sixteen. He has published nine novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (awarded the Hawthornden Prize,) Landed (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the IMPAC Award) and The Horseman, as well as essays on sport.
Tim Pears has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught creative writing for the Arvon Foundation, the University of Oxford, First Story and Ruskin College, among others.
He lives in Oxford with his wife and children. His main interests are rural wandering and football coaching.

The Bookshop Band are Ben Please and Beth Porter, who write songs inspired by books and play them in bookshops. Their performances are inextricably linked to the books themselves, as the band take it in turns to describe where the inspiration for each song came from.

Bookings