For our January meeting, we’re delighted to welcome Alice Jolly as our main speaker.
Alice Jolly has written novels, plays, short stories and a memoir. She taught fiction at Oxford University for 16 years. She has won the Ackerley Prize for memoir and the V.S.Pritchett Prize (awarded by The Royal Society of Literature) for a short story.
Her historical novel ‘Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile’ is written in the voice of a nineteenth century servant girl and was runner up for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize in 2018. It was also longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and was a Walter Scott Prize recommended novel in 2018.
Alice’s talk will focus on voice in historical fiction. For the writer, what are the opportunities offered by extra-ordinary first-person voices? And also what are the risks? First person voices can obviously bring a character vividly to life but how do they also create a sense of place, even a whole world?
How do we create and construct a voice that is not our own and how do we write that voice onto the page? What is the role of rhythm in such writing and how reliable (or unreliable) should our narrator be? Do please read ‘Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile’ in advance. Alice will be pleased to answer any questions on that book or on historical fiction more generally.
Our guest speaker for this evening will be local author David Hill. He’ll be talking about different approaches to writing about art and artworks.
David Hill is a Scottish author, currently based in England, whose work combines fiction and art history. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University’s Creative Writing Programme (MA Distinction). Whilst studying for an MA in Art History from Birkbeck College, University of London, for which he received a Distinction, he became fascinated with reclaiming exploited female voices that had been written out of art history. His debut novel tackles one of the most extreme examples of this and was longlisted for the 2023 Bridport Prize.
The meeting will be Tuesday January 14th, at the Tower Arts Centre. Come along from 7:00pm. Talks start at 7:30pm. Members free, non-member tickets £10, students £2 (no advance booking, payment on entry).
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