Starting out in Fiction With Karin Altenberg & Andrew Miller, Guest Sally Magnusson

Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 2nd Aug - Sat 7th Aug, 2021
All Day

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

If you think you have the writing bug but you’re unsure how to get started, Karin and Andrew will guide you through that difficult space between wanting and doing, the ambition and the act. With a mix of daily workshops and opportunities for one-to-ones with the tutors, you will, from the first evening, find yourself being drawn into the grand adventure of writing. No one need feel intimidated. The atmosphere will be one of friendliness and support, a creative balance between the solitary and social, between hard work and fun.

Karin Altenberg is a novelist, critic and translator. Her first novel, Island of Wings, was nominated for the Orange Prize, the Saltire Award and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Award. She is a non-fiction reviewer for the Wall Street Journal and a published translator of poetry, non-fiction and fiction from Swedish into English. Born and brought up in southern Sweden, Karin moved to Britain 25 years ago.  She holds a PhD in Archaeology and continues to scrutinise the past to illuminate the present.

Andrew Miller’s first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy. It was followed by Casanova, Oxygen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001, The Optimists, One Morning Like A Bird, Pure, which won The Costa Book of the Year Award 2011, and The Crossing. His novel, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free won The Highland Book Prize 2018 and was shortlisted for The Walter Scott Prize.

Sally Magnusson is a writer and broadcaster based in Glasgow. In 2014 the memoir of her mother’s dementia, Where Memories Go, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Her 2018 fictional debut, The Sealwoman’s Gift, based on the true story of a 17th-century Algerian pirate raid on Iceland, was shortlisted for six literary awards. Her second, The Ninth Child, published in 2020, blends Victorian engineering at Loch Katrine, Victoria and Albert’s domestic life, the silent trauma of female miscarriage and some very chilling folklore. It was described by Scotland on Sunday as “cementing Magnusson’s place … as one of Scotland’s leading writers of historical fiction”. She is working on a third, about women in the Clearances.

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If you want to attend a course with a family member, or someone within your extended household, please do let us know and we can arrange use of our former twin rooms. These are available at £600 per person.

 

Please note, due to Covid-19, all residential courses and retreats will likely run with a smaller number of participants than normal, which may change depending on Scottish Government regulations at the time. We will provide a fully catered service, offering delicious and nutritious meals and snacks to allow you to fully immerse yourself in your writing.  Prior to your visit with us, we will provide information about our virus mitigation measures and send you our Covid-19 guidance notes.

Bookings