Tuesday and Wednesday, June 17–18, 10 am–3 pm
Shakespeare & Co., 37 rue de la Bucherie, 75005 Paris
Life-writing workshop
Carolyn Burke, author of Lee Miller, A Life (Knopf/Bloomsbury) and Becoming Modern, The Life of Mina Loy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is pleased to offer a two-day intensive workshop for writers working on biographies and memoirs or planning to do so. Topics covered will include choice of subject, research techniques, the proposal as a way to clarify emphasis and structure, and narrative strategies to ensure liveliness — the techniques of fiction applied to the richly contextual form that is contemporary biography. We will work together with materials that bring historical perspective to the intimate details of a life or a set of lives in their intertwinings.
Participants should send two pages of their projects to James at Shakespeare & Co. (james@shakespeareandcompany) by June 1 if possible. Last-minute participants are also welcome.
Lee Miller was published in French by Autrement in 2007; the Nouvelle Revue Française will publish the translation of a chapter from Becoming Modern in October 2008. Carolyn is now writing a life of Edith Piaf, to be published by Knopf.
Thursday, June 12 – Sunday, June 15
Shakespeare & Co., 37 rue de la Bucherie, 75005 Paris
Shakespeare & Company Literary Festival
Real Lives: Exploring Memoir & Biography
Thirty of the world’s most celebrated writers will come together to explore this genre on the Left Bank of Paris opposite Notre Dame. This is the only literary festival in the heart of Paris and perpetuates the long-standing tradition of Shakespeare & Company fostering literary life in Paris. Carolyn’s talk, “Biography and Serendipity,” will take place at three o’clock on June 12.
From the advertisement for the Festival
in the New York Review of Books, May 29, 2008
Back to Carolyn Burke