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Course description
In this innovative workshop, led by acclaimed author and journalist Lara Pawson, we’ll explore ways to mine our imaginations, memories, and the facts of our lives and the world around us for the raw stuff of writing, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction or somewhere in between. We’ll examine how images, objects, and our senses and bodies can yield fertile material from which to build a text. And by close reading texts, including Joe Brainard’s classic I Remember and Lara’s own Spent Light, we’ll learn how to use mental jumps, ruptures and associations to link the present and the past in our writing, giving it fresh depth and emotional complexity.
About the tutor
Lara Pawson is an acclaimed author and journalist. Her latest book Spent Light is a hybrid text that has been described variously as a novel, a work of auto-fiction, and a prose poem, and was a finalist for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize and a TLS, Guardian, Frieze and New Statesman Book of the Year, while her memoir and nonfiction books have been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Orwell Book Prize, among other awards. Her writing on politics, literature and art is widely published across the UK and international press, and she has taught creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.