Recommended Reading

This is a background reading list. It is not prescriptive, so students can dip into any of these books at any point in the course. The tutors will refer to a range of novels throughout, as and when it is key to the course and the students' own writing.

  1. Athill, Diana, Stet. London: Granta
  2. Blake, Carole, From Pitch to Publication. London: Macmillan 
  3. Boylan, Clare (ed.), The Agony and the Ego: The Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored. London: Penguin Books. 
  4. Brande, Dorothea, Becoming a Writer. London: Macmillan
  5. Forster, E.M., Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin Books
  6. Gardner, J., On Becoming a Novelist. New York: Norton
  7. Greene, Graham, A Sort of Life. London: Penguin Books
  8. Hiney, Tom and Macshane, Frank (eds.), The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction 1909-1959. London: Penguin Books
  9. King, Stephen, On Writing. London: Pocket Books
  10. Leader, Zachary (ed.), On Modern British Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  11. Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin Books
  12. Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer. Harper Collins
  13. Steinbeck, John, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. London: Penguin Books
  14. Taylor-Guthrie (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison. University of Mississippi Press 
  15. The Paris Review Interviews: Women Writers at Work (1999) London: Harvill Press
  16. Woolf, Virginia, A Writer's Diary. London: Penguin Books