Louise Dean
The award-winning, Booker Prize-listed author.
Booker Prize-listed, winner of the Betty Trask Prize and longlisted for other awards, Louise was described by the Wall Street Journal as one of the world’s top five most underrated authors. Her standing as an author of literary fiction, her love of the craft and her care for her writers have earned her plaudits from publishing professionals, literary agencies and a Nobel Laureate for Literature.
Why I started The Novelry
“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
Louise Dean, author
Louise Dean is the author of four novels and has been published globally by Penguin and Simon & Schuster among others. She 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 praised by the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She was a finalist for the Costa 2020 Short Story Award.
Louise holds an MA (Cantab) from the University of Cambridge and has taught creative writing since 2008. This combination of academic training, professional authorship and long-standing teaching practice underpins The Novelry’s rigorous, craft-led approach to the teaching of fiction.
Praise for Louise Dean
Novels by Louise Dean
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 neighbor, 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.
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.
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 20 years ago and reinvented himself. At 40, he has returned home to Kent in the South East of England and found happiness with his girlfriend Astrid and her 12-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.
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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. Rumors 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.