Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 14th Nov - Sat 19th Nov, 2022
All Day
Location
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire , IV4 7HT
Telling Your Story
What’s the heart of your story and how might you find the voice in which to tell it? What techniques can you use to anchor a narrative so it feels true to your lived experience? In this practical and immersive course on the art of writing memoir, Chitra Ramaswamy and Colin Grant will guide you through the process of constructing your story, offering tips and hacks on voice, structure, and what to leave in and take out when telling the story of your life.
Colin Grant is an author of five books. They include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey; and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the Pen/Ackerley Prize, 2013. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016.
As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word.
Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing. He also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, TLS, London Review of Books, Granta and New York Review of Books.
Grant’s Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation was a BBC radio 4 Book of the Week and a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019. His latest memoir, Play Fool to Catch Wise, is published by Jonathan Cape in 2022.
Chitra Ramaswamy is a journalist and author. Her latest book, Homelands: The History of a Friendship, published by Canongate in April 2022, is a work of creative non-fiction exploring her friendship with a 98-year-old German Jewish refugee called Henry Wuga. Her first book, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy, published by Saraband in April 2016, won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize. She has contributed essays to Antlers of Water, Nasty Women, The Freedom Papers, The Bi:ble, and Message From The Skies. She writes for The Guardian, is the restaurant critic for The Times Scotland, and broadcasts for BBC radio. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner, two children and rescue dog.
Cathy Rentzenbrink is the author of The Last Act of Love, A Manual for Heartache and Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books. Her first novel is called Everyone is Still Alive was published in July 2021. Cathy regularly chairs literary events, interviews authors, reviews books, and speaks and writes on life, death, love, and literature. She works as a teacher and mentor and her absolute favourite thing about her rich and varied writing life is encouraging others to tell their own stories.
The full fee for this course is £650. This includes your accommodation in a single room with shared bathroom, all meals, hot drinks and snacks from Monday afternoon until Saturday morning, and your tuition. A limited number of en-suite rooms are available for a £50 surcharge. For more information about the practicalities of our courses and retreats, please visit our About the Courses page.
Please let us know if you have any access requirements, for example a ground floor bedroom and / or access to a wheelchair-accessible shower room. For more information about access to our courses, please visit our Access page.
Bookings
This event is fully booked. Please email info@moniackmhor.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.