Louise Dean
Founder and Course Director.
The Prize-Winning 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 Society of Authors Betty Trask Prize and Le Prince Maurice Prize, been nominated for The Guardian First Book Prize, and longlisted for Dublin International Literary Award and The Booker Prize. A finalist for the Costa Coffee 2020 Short Story Award.
Her books have been deemed the top books of their year by The Guardian, The Observer and Publishers Weekly.
As a Tutor.
Louise is known for her warm encouragement of her writers as a teacher. If you're writing dark comedy, literary or historical fiction, Louise Dean is the right tutor for you. (For other genres, you might prefer to select one of our other specialist tutors.) Louise gives classes to members at the Story Clinic sessions and hosts the fortnightly Sunday evening Team Chat for The Novelry. As Course Director, Louise keeps tabs on every single writer at The Novelry.
“I have wonderful support from Louise herself in our one-on-ones - they are like giant, virtual hugs.” Lauren Vosbein.
“Louise’s advice comes from a place of experience and heart. She instils confidence in people.” Alison Powell.
“With Louise, you have a fabulous tutor, mentor and friend all in one.” Janice Cumberlidge.
Louise Dean's Writing.
(Almost twenty years experience as a published author.)
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.” (On 'This Human Season'.)
Ali Smith. Winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award.
“Louise Dean is an eloquent architect of strengths and shapes of passion, and remarkable in her harshly lyrical delineations of the lives of women and girls... (This Human Season) is a novel which captures a community's resilience and its humour full of broken glass. Louise Dean describes the exact glint of this spirit.”
The Reviews.
"Magnificent." Arena.
"Breathtaking." The Observer.
"Louise Dean's fearless, frank and darkly comic novels have brought a fresh colour and character to English fiction." The Independent.
"Audacious ... remarkable .... with such compassion and perceptive detail - nothing short of astonishing." The Telegraph.
"All her characters are perfectly conceived, their inner dialogues spot on, her observations so sharp they make you wince." Time Out
"Dean's observations have a lyrical intensity few can match." The Guardian.
"Dean writes with beautifully controlled clarity. She’s extremely funny, but also humane and moving." The Times
"Breathtaking." San Francisco chronicle
"Compassionate and amusing." Times Literary Supplement.
The Reviews.
"Fizzes with talent." The Sunday Times.
"Dean is an audacious arrival in British fiction. She is unafraid to tackle unsexy or unsafe material." The Guardian.
"Dean's great achievement is showing us how ordinary people can go on with their lives in the midst of extraordinary brutality and how a few are able to do so with compassion and hope." People.
"Dean has a deliciously lucid and seemingly effortless style, as well as the gift of being able to write about each character from the inside, making their motives and actions clear. She has an unerring ear for dialogue." Daily Mail.
"Brit Lit star lives up the hype." Ladies Home Journal.
"Pitch-perfect." New York Times. "Dean's characters have the rough edges and surprising grace of real people, and her fierce humanism animates every page."
"One of the world's five most underrated authors." Wall Street Journal.
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 a life full of that 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.
The Book in a Year Plan.
The Best Year of Your Life.
Welcome to the no-fear novel. From a confident start to a happy ending. Create, write and complete a manuscript to publishing standard. Your tutor will oversee your progress to ensure you stay on track. We submit your work, when it's ready, to leading literary agents. While we offer a number of different courses (scroll down), most opt for this. The best route to becoming a published author.
Commit to your novel and save money with our bundled package and VIP support from the moment you sign up. Start today.
The “Life-changing” Courses with Five Star Reviews.
Most serious writers take courses or apprenticeships with published authors.
Stephen King learnt from John Gould. Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Gillian Flynn and Tracy Chevalier all took classes. The list is long. Few are the authors who didn't study their craft. Learn from an acclaimed author. Write with confidence.
Read our Blog.
Great advice from novelists every Sunday. Sign up below to get it to your inbox and browse the back issues at our blog.
Get the Sunday Blog.
Sign up to receive our weekly blog with advice for writers to your inbox.