Fiction – Novel: James Robertson & Cynthia Rogerson, Guest: Helen Oyeyemi

Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 10th Jun - Sat 15th Jun, 2019
All Day

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

Find the Heart of Your Novel

The novel is a big and unmapped space: it is easy to lose your way, get bogged down in detail, run out of energy or become convinced that your characters and their situations are of no interest. If you have a novel in progress but it is not progressing, this course will help you get back on track and find the heart of your story. Shared workshops will focus on pruning back your rambling prose, strengthening characters and dialogue, overcoming plot problems and building a convincing narrative, while one-to-one tutorials will address issues specific to your own work.

James Robertson is a poet, fiction writer, publisher and editor. He has written more than forty books, including many for children for the Scots language imprint Itchy Coo, which he co-founded in 2002. His most recent book, Arrest This Moment, is a biography of the Dundee songwriter, the late Michael Marra. He is the author of four collections of short stories and six novels. His novel Joseph Knight (2003) won both the Saltire Society and Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year awards. The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006) was a Richard & Judy Book Club choice and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And the Land Lay Still (2010) was Saltire Society Book of the Year, and To Be Continued (2016) was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. He lives in rural Angus.

Cynthia Rogerson is the author of five novels and a collection of stories. I Love You Goodbye was translated into six languages, short-listed for Scottish Novel of the Year, and dramatised for BBC radio. Winner of the V.S. Pritchett Prize, she has had short stories broadcast, anthologised, short-listed and included in literary magazines.  Wait for Me Jack was published in 2017 under Addison Jones. She holds a RLF Fellowship and tutors on the University of Edinburgh’s creative writing programme. She grew up near San Francisco and has lived in Scotland for over thirty years. www.cynthiarogerson.com

Helen Oyeyemi is the author of six novels, including White is for Witching, which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award, and Mr Fox, which won a 2012 Hurston/ Wright Legacy Award. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2013, and was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists the same year. Her story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours was published in 2016.

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