It was a great pleasure to welcome the highly successful novelist, Louise Doughty, to the College on Friday 2nd December. She spoke to the Upper Sixth about all aspects of her fascinating career: novels, radio broadcasting and newspaper journalism, life as a free-lance writer. She described her life as a novelist, reading a powerful extract from her most recent novel, Fires in the Dark, and spoke about the forthcoming work, Stone Cradle. In addition, Louise talked movingly about her experiences teaching creative writing in Sri Lanka last winter, shortly after the tsunami had struck.

Novelist Louise Doughty has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She won an Ian St James Award in 1990 for an early short story, and her first play, Maybe, won a Radio Times Drama Award and was later broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Her second radio play, The Koala Bear Joke, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 1994 and her third, Nightworkers, in 1996. She has also worked widely as a freelance journalist and broadcaster.

Her first novel, Crazy Paving, a black comedy based on her experiences working in London, was published in 1995, and was followed by Dance with Me (1996), a love story, and Honey-Dew (1998), a satirical re-working of the traditional murder mystery. Her fourth novel, entitled Fires in the Dark (2003), is the story of one Bohemian Gypsy's survival in the Second World War. It is the first in a series of long novels exploring her Romany family heritage and the history and present-day situation of the Roma people across Europe.

Bibliography

'As a child I was shy and bookish, constantly making up stories and inventing imaginary friends. When I was older, books were an invaluable refuge. I still love inventing stories and I love using language to describe them. I feel very lucky to be paid for doing so. My first three novels were, in part, explorations of various elements of my own experiences. My subsequent books are moving away from myself to cover wider territory. I enjoy research and travel, and trying to imagine myself as different people living in different times and places. The comment that has pleased me most in any of the reviews of my work was when one critic said, "Louise Doughty writes about people who don't usually get written about."'