Ritchie leaves Curtis Brown for A M Heath
thebookseller.com – Thursday March 9, 2017
Literary agent Rebecca Ritchie is leaving Curtis Brown after five years to join A M Heath.
Ritchie is moving to her new role on 18th April to develop her list of commercial fiction and non-fiction. As well as co-founding Twitter initiative #PitchCB, Ritchie has worked alongside Sheila Crowley and represented authors herself such as Red magazine’s literary editor Sarra Manning, Alex Lake, author of After Anna (Harper), the Sunday Times Top 10 paperback bestseller and Iona Grey, author of last year’s overall Romantic Novel of the Year Letters to the Lost (Simon & Schuster).
Report reveals difficulty in making a living from writing
business.scoop.co.nz – Monday March 6, 2017
A new report that looks at how New Zealand writer’s earn from their writing has revealed that very few are able to make writing their fulltime career.
George Saunders: what writers really do when they write
theguardian.com – Saturday March 4, 2017
Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wife’s cousin pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the crypt “on several occasions” to hold the boy’s body. An image spontaneously leapt into my mind – a melding of the Lincoln Memorial and the Pietà. I carried that image around for the next 20-odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn’t getting any younger, not wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read “Afraid to Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”, decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments. My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt, and now I find myself in the familiar writerly fix of trying to talk about that process as if I were in control of it.
What Moonlight Teaches Us About The Importance Of Creative Writing Training
huffingtonpost.co.uk – Tuesday February 28, 2017
Tarell McCraney, the writer of the play which is the basis of the film Moonlight which was last night’s Oscar winner for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay amongst other awards, was in the year above me at Yale, where we were both studying for an MFA in Playwriting at Yale School of Drama.
Poetry, love and psychosis: can writing help us come to terms with mental illness?
theguardian.com – Thursday February 23, 2017
Paula Keogh never intended to write about her relationship with Michael Dransfield, one of the most prominent – and colourful – poets in Australian literature.
“I was actually doing a PhD on Michael’s poetry,” she tells Guardian Australia. “And my supervisor discovered that Michael and I had known each other and been very close, and she said, ‘Hang on, I don’t know whether you’re writing the right thesis here, maybe you should write a memoir!’”
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