With Sally Bayley, Gabriel Krauze, Nikesh Shukla and Rebecca Abrams
Perhaps you are embarking on putting together your own story; how would you go about it? What matters more, the research or the writing? Authenticity or style?
Sally Bayley’s first instalment of her memoir tells of a life saved by books. In real life Gabriel Krauze left Kilburn gangs for writing. Next year Nikesh Shukla will publish his own story of race, family and home.
Rebecca Abrams explores with them how they have shaped their own experience on the page.
Contributors
Sally Bayley
Sally Bayley is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University where she teaches academic and creative writing. Her publications include a study of the American home, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space (Peter Lang, 2010) and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets (Unbound, 2016). She is now completing a series of three books which explore a child’s escape into literature as a form of retreat in the face of difficult social circumstances. The first, Girl with Dove: a Life Built by Books (William Collins, 2018) was Radio 4’s Book of the Week in January 2019, and a Spectator Book of the Year (2018). The second illustrated part, No Boys Play Here, will be published March 2021, and will tell the story of the same young girl in search of a lost father and uncle through Shakespeare’s characters.
Gabriel Krauze
Gabriel Krauze grew up in London in a Polish family and was drawn to a life of crime and gangs from an early age. Now in his thirties he has left that world behind and is recapturing his life through writing. He has published short stories in Vice. His first novel, Who They Was, has been long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize.
Nikesh Shukla
Nikesh Shukla is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Coconut Unlimited (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award), Meatspace and the critically acclaimed The One Who Wrote Destiny. Nikesh is a contributing editor to the Observer Magazine and was previously their columnist. Nikesh is the editor of the bestselling essay collection, The Good Immigrant, which won the reader's choice at the Books Are My Bag Awards. He co-edited The Good Immigrant USA with Chimene Suleyman. He is the author of two YA novels, Run, Riot (shortlisted for a National Book Award) and The Boxer (longlisted for the Carnegie Medal). Nikesh was one of Time Magazine’s cultural leaders, Foreign Policy magazine's 100 Global Thinkers and The Bookseller's 100 most influential people in publishing in 2016 and in 2017. He is the co-founder of the literary journal, The Good Journal and The Good Literary Agency.
Chair
Rebecca Abrams
Rebecca is an author, teacher, and literary journalist. She is the Writer-in-Residence at Brasenose College, Oxford; a long-standing tutor on the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, and a regular literary critic for the Financial Times.
Her most recent book, The Jewish Journey: 4000 years in 22 objects (Ashmolean Museum, 2017), was described as ‘a celebration of Jewish life in all its worldly immensity… a tribute to the cosmopolitan ideals of Stefan Zweig’ (FT, 2017). Her fiction debut, Touching Distance (Macmillan, 2008) was shortlisted for the 2009 McKitterick Prize and won the 2009 Medical Journalists’ Association Award for Fiction.
M is for memoir
Dr Sally Bayley
Gabriel Krauze
Nikesh Shukla
© Mahtab Hussain
Rebecca Abrams
