Speaker: Frances Wilson
Frances Wilson is an award-winning biographer and critic who has taught life-writing courses at The Faber Academy, Guardian Masterclasses, The British Library, The Oldie, the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Arvon writing retreats and The How to Academy. She also has twenty years experience of one-to-one mentoring.
PRICE:
£495.00
Enroll now
Led by acclaimed biographer and critic Frances Wilson, this four-week course for aspiring life-writers will help you to clarify your ideas, find your voice and shape your narrative.
This immersive digital masterclass is designed for anyone who has a true story to tell, either about themselves or someone else – a grandparent perhaps, or the ancestor whose picture is hanging in the hall.
It might be about an ordinary or an extraordinary life, a public or a private life, or even a transformative experience that made no sense at all at the time and would benefit from deep exploration. You might be half-way through a project already or wondering how to begin; you might have a mountain of letters and diaries to work with or nothing at all.
Taught online over successive afternoons by Frances Wilson, the award-winning author of biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey, this series will give you the guidance, motivation and instruction needed to complete your project.
This 5-week online course includes four on-demand lessons and a live Q&A session with Frances. Each lesson is released weekly according to the course schedule and can be accessed anytime for up to eight weeks after its release. The live Q&A takes place in real-time over Zoom.
The Program:
Session One
Friday 2nd May
What Shape Does Your Story Take?
Memoirs and biographies can appear in many guises, and this first session will help you find the right shape for your story. It might be told best as a novel, a series of stories, or through the themes that have dominated your life – a love of music, gardens, films or butterflies.
Session Two
Friday 9th May
Autofiction
Through an examination of ‘My Struggle’, the six volume masterpiece by Karl Ove Knausgaard, this session will show what can be done with a life story if you tell it as ‘autofiction’.
Session Three
Friday 16th May
Character and voice
Finding the right voice can be the most difficult part of life-writing. The appeal of your voice is what will compel the reader to stay with you on the page, but the voice in which you write is not necessarily the voice with which you speak. And how do you capture character – including your own – in a few lines?
Session Four
Friday 23rd May
Memory and spirit of place
This session will show to write a memoir even if you have no memories, and how to capture the genius loci of the places that have been important to you, from your bedroom to the view from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Session Five
Friday 30th May
3:00pm – 4:00pm GMT
Live Q&A
Meet Frances Wilson
Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her books include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, How to Survive the Titanic: Or, the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay, and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. Her most recent book, Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and picked as ‘Book of the Year’ by The Times, Guardian, Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, Mail on Sunday and The TLS. She was a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, 2019, and was chair of the judges for the Goldsmiths Prize, 2020. Her life of Muriel Spark will be published in 2025.
The Art of Life Writing
A Four Week course led by Frances Wilson
Next Course: Friday 2nd May 2025
This 5-week online course includes four on-demand lessons and a live Q&A session with Frances. Each lesson is released weekly according to the course schedule and can be accessed anytime for up to eight weeks after its release. The live Q&A takes place in real-time over Zoom.
