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An RSL/Booker Prize Foundation Masterclass with Adam Foulds on fiction that incorporates real people’s lives, or ‘bio-fiction’.

Top Tips

• Research your subject thoroughly, through biographies, letters and diaries. Clarify your thinking about them, about what the story is that you have to tell.
• Research your period. Get a sense of its picture of the world, its politics and religion. Social history is particularly important and useful: fashion, food, language. These give you much of the texture of everyday life.
• Write as though you’d done no research and were inventing. Take for granted what the characters do. See what they see. Allow yourself to know much more than you say.
• Be a novelist, i.e. enjoy yourself, be shameless, think of impressing and entertaining your readers.

Reading List

Penelope Fitzgerald	The Blue Flower
Alethea Hayter	A Sultry Month
Don DeLillo	Libra
Gordon Burn	Alma Cogan

Recorded on: September 8, 2012
Recorded at: Somerset House
Sponsored by: Booker Prize Foundation