Virtual Lancaster

Local author Carys Davies. Author photo © Emily Atherton. Via Salt Publishing

Three professional authors, including BBC Radio 4 script writer Carys Davies, will be in Lancaster for a free event to talk about their craft in St. Nicholas Arcades on Saturday 22nd March.

“Writing is a business,” explains Creative Writing PhD student and emerging writer Yvonne Battle-Felton, who is hosting the event, titled The Writing Life.

“Talent, passion and an engaging story will make you a writer,” she continues, “But pursuing a career as a writer means looking at writing from multiple perspectives: marketing, accounting, promoting, networking, planning, and balancing multiple projects. How do you balance crafting stories with crafting a career?”

“I always pictured myself as a writer living near the ocean sipping something exotic and fruity,” Yvonne says of her vocation on her own blog. “Now I use my writing to learn about myself, to advocate for others; to voice to experiences.

After being accepted to Lancaster University’s Creative Writing PHD program she says she finds herself “writing more, experiencing everything.

Yvonne will be joined on the panel of professional writers at Lancaster University’s “Campus in the City”  in St. Nicholas Arcades by award-winning author Carys Davies and fiction and non-fiction writer, lecturer George Green, as they talk about making a living as a writer, balancing projects and designing a writing life.

Carys’s stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and widely published in magazines and anthologies. She won the 2010 Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Award, the 2011 Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize and a 2013 Northern Writers’ Award, and has been shortlisted and longlisted for many other prizes, including the Wales Book of the Year, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the William Trevor/ Elizabeth Bowen Short Story Prize.

George Green, author of two well regarded historical adventure novels, Hound and Hawk, was born in Dublin in 1956 and brought up in Tipperary, where he lived in a house built on an ancient burial mound. After university he embarked on a career in sport and leisure in the hope that it would not be too difficult and help him meet girls.

Ten years later he realized his mistake, took an MA in Creative Writing, began teaching and now works for the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University.

• The Writing Life 2.00pm Saturday 22nd March 2014, Lancaster University’s “Campus in the City”  in St. Nicholas Arcades (near Costa Coffee). Free but register for tickets here