Just a quick advertisement for our upcoming workshop specifically designed for up and coming authors of historical fiction: How to Get the History Right in your Historical Fiction: A workshop for authors.
As you may be aware, last year the IHR hosted a conference entitled Novel Approaches: From Academic History to Historical Fiction which was also produced online in the form of a virtual conference. Both events were hugely successful so we thought we would go one step further by running a workshop on getting the History right when writing historical fiction. We will have various experts at hand including the published novelist Elizabeth Chadwick, an expert from the Geffrye Museum and medieval historian and research training officer at the IHR, Dr Simon Trafford. The basic blurb is below so please do join us!
Getting to know other times and other places well enough to describe them convincingly is one of the great pleasures of writing historical fiction, but also one of its greatest challenges. Anyone can achieve a basic feel for an age by reading published histories, but to go beyond this, to enter the mental and physical world of the inhabitants of another age, to see through their eyes, to touch the objects that they knew and to speak with their voices, requires detailed knowledge and the understanding that can come only from autonomous research. Above all, it helps to know and understand contemporary source materials, but to find and use these requires specialised skills.
This one-day workshop aims to encourage writers to develop their abilities as historical researchers, introducing the tools and techniques employed by academic historians, and showing how to get the most from libraries, archives, museums, art galleries and, of course, the internet. Teaching will take place in an informal format with participants actively encouraged to discuss the problems they encounter and to share their own experiences.
Date: 26 April 2012 Time: 10.30-1700 Location: Senate House, London Cost: £100For further information and the application form please click here.