Life Writing offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. This volume makes use of new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings for writers who are specializing in life writing. Using their experience and expertise as teachers as well as authors, Derek Neale and Sara Haslam guide aspiring writers through such key writing skills as: writing what you know, investigating biography and autobiography, using prefaces, finding a form, using memory, developing characters, using novelistic, poetic and dramatic techniques. The volume is further updated to include never-before published interviews and conversations with successful life writers such as Jenny Diski, Robert Fraser, Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Jackie Kay, Hanif Kureishi and Blake Morrison. Concise and practical, Life Writing offers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of authorship and is a must-read for aspiring writers.

Sara Haslam is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University. She is the author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (2002), and editor of Ford’s England and the English (2003) as well as Ford Madox Ford and the City (2005). She is working on a study of Ford’s biography.

Derek Neale is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. He is an award winning fiction writer and much of his PhD research focused on the link between writing and memory. He is editor and co-author of A Creative Writing Handbook (2009, A&C Black) and co-author of Writing Fiction (2008, Routledge).