Reading More Into Past Lives

Newcastle Herald

Saturday May 17, 2008

By FRANCES THOMPSON

A NEWCASTLE weekend conference has creative writers celebrating the boom in books written by ordinary people about real life.

The publishing phenomenon in what is officially called creative non-fiction, had fiction on the run, University of Newcastle creative writing lecturer Keri Glastonbury said.

Conference guest British author Blake Morrison is credited with writing a book in 1993 that sparked this trend.

Titled And When Did You Last See Your Father?, it was about the death of his father.

"There was no other subject in my head when he died," Professor Morrison said yesterday.

"Writing was a therapy and a help."

Professor Morrison said what he called the life-writing genre attracted writers and readers because it helped them make sense of the past.

Newcastle writer Michael Sala, who was short-listed for the 2007 Vogel award for unpublished manuscripts, was talking through angles, tenses and cliches at the conference yesterday.

Mr Sala turned to his life as a child migrant in Australia and parenthood as inspiration for the Vogel entry.

Dr Glastonbury said fiction was becoming harder to publish.

Her theory is that the baby boomer generation, facing retirement and mortality, is driving the demand for biography, personal essays, nature writing and literary journalism.

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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