'Like going on a journey'

 

“I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.” –  Rose Tremain

English author Tremain, born on this date in 1943, is a historical novelist and short story writer.  She said she approaches her subjects "from unexpected angles, concentrating her attention on unglamorous outsiders," an approach that has won her most of historical fiction’s major awards.

 

Also a long-time professor of creative writing (starting in 1988) at her alma mater, the University of East Anglia, she was the first UAE graduate, first woman, and first writer to be named Chancellor at the school, a post she held from 2013-2016.

 

She won Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (Music and Silence) in 1999; the Orange Prize, given to Britain’s top female writer, for The Road Home in 2008; and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for Merivel: A Man of His Time in 2013.   Her 2023 novel, Absolutely & Forever, also has been nominated for the Walter Scott Prize.         

  

 Tremain said even though her work is “historical,” there’s a bit of herself in each of her characters, male and female, and she always goes into her writing with the belief that the day’s output is waiting to be discovered.  “I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning,” she said.   “I feel their writing days must be very bland.”