Louise Dean
Founder and Course Director.
Louise Dean, The Founder of The Novelry.
“Yes, I believe you can learn to write. I did. I don't believe it's an innate, God-given talent. I think it's much more about tenderness, a sense of humour, and willpower.”
“I started The Novelry in 2017 when it occurred to me that writing was the only craft that wasn't collegiate. Other arts and crafts form working associations, and apprenticeships, and share learning and skills. But not literature? It made no sense. I invited writers to write alongside me and The Bookseller announced this call to arms, and The Novelry was born. All writers are equal before the white page. We all feel the same fears, and exhilarations. Now we share the wear and the magic too. I'm passionate about my writers' development and thrilled to see their successes.”
The Award-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.Her books have been deemed the top books of their year by The Guardian, The Observer and Publishers Weekly. A finalist for the Costa Coffee 2020 Short Story Award.
Louise is the Founder of The Novelry and Course Director.
Praise for Louise Dean, the 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.” J.M Coetzee.
The Reviews.
"Magnificent." Arena.
"Fizzes with talent." The Sunday Times.
"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.
"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.
The Novels.
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.
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