Louise Dean
‘Yes, I believe you can learn to write. I did. I don’t believe it’s an innate talent. It’s much more about tenderness, a sense of humour, and willpower.’
Booker Prize-listed, winner of The Betty Trask Prize and longlisted for other awards, the Wall Street Journal described Louise as one of the world’s top five most underrated authors.
Her standing as an author of literary fiction combined with her love of the craft of writing, and care for her writing students has earned her plaudits from publishing industry professionals, literary agencies and the Nobel Laureate for Literature.
‘I started The Novelry in 2017 when it occurred to me that writing was the only art that wasn’t collegiate. Other arts form working associations and apprenticeships, and share learning and skills. But not literature? It made no sense. I invited writers to write with me and The Novelry was born. Now we share our knowledge. I’m passionate about my writers’ work and thrilled to cheer their successes.’ —Louise Dean.
When you write a book, you’re leaving a route back to you for someone, sometime.
—Louise Dean
Louise Dean, author
‘Dean deserves a huge readership.’ —The Times
Louise Dean is the author of four novels and has been published globally by Penguin and Simon & Schuster amongst others. Louise has won The Betty Trask Prize and Le Prince Maurice Prize, been nominated for the Guardian First Book Prize, and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award and The Booker Prize. Her books have been deemed the top books of their year by the Guardian, Observer and Publishers Weekly. She was a finalist for the Costa Coffee 2020 Short Story Award.
Praise for Louise Dean
J.M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize Laureate.
‘I read Louise Dean’s Becoming Strangers with pleasure and admiration.’
‘With clear-eyed compassion, and with all the resources of the novelist’s art, Louise Dean leads us through those terrible days when for a while Belfast was a vortex for the worst of the world’s cruelty and pain.’ —J.M. Coetzee
Booker Prize
Louise Dean, longlisted for her first novel, Becoming Strangers, once memorably likened writing to good bowel habits: ‘Do it regularly, at the same time each day, and use plenty of paper.’
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‘Louise Dean launches 90-day writers’ community
‘Booker Prize-longlisted author Louise Dean has launched a community to help writers produce a novel in ninety days.’ The Bookseller 2017
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Becoming Strangers
After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are taking their last, as illness and incompatibility bring their unhappy union to an end. At first the luxury of a Caribbean resort is no match for the well-worn patterns of domestic life. Then the couples’ paths cross, and a series of surprises ensues – a disappearance and an assault – but also a tempest of passions, slights, misunderstandings and small awakenings that punctuate a week in which each pair struggles to come to terms with what’s been keeping them apart.
This Human Season
It is November 1979. Kathleen’s son Sean has just been transferred to Belfast's most notorious prison – Long Kesh, recently renamed the Maze. Kathleen knows that he will join the other prisoners on their non-cooperation protest, known as the Blanket. Rumours of a hunger strike are beginning to circulate. John Dunn has finished twenty years in the British Army. After three tours of Belfast, he’s found a girl and a house, and a job as a prison guard. In the weeks before Christmas, both Kathleen and John will find themselves in impossible situations. Both will have to find a way to survive when everything they love is in danger of being destroyed.
The Idea of Love
Richard is the head of sales in Africa for a pharmaceutical company. He spends most of his time away on business, sleeping with other women and pushing psychiatric drugs on a developing market. Back in Provence, he and his wife, Valérie, no longer share a bed, and his teenage son, Maxence, is hearing voices. When Richard begins an affair with a neighbour, Rachel, he discovers that Valérie, too, is having an affair – with Rachel’s husband, Jeff. Suddenly, a routine trip to Africa to sell pharmaceuticals is more than he can handle and his life starts to implode as he realizes that the idea of love he has cherished is a mere illusion.
The Old Romantic
Meet Ken. He’s obsessed with death, planning his own funeral and desperate to die in the bosom of his family. Unfortunately for Ken, that’s the last place his family wants him. His oldest son Nick left home over twenty years ago and reinvented himself. At forty, he has returned home to Kent in the South East of England and found happiness with his girlfriend Astrid and her twelve-year-old daughter Laura, and he doesn’t want the old man to spoil things. He’s come a long way; he’s a professional, a country gent, a family man. But the past is coming back for Nick and it won’t let him be. An Oprah Book Club Book of The Week.
‘A significant voice in British Fiction.’
—Observer
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