Tag: Claire Scobie

(Pre)historical fiction

SoutherlyBlog

by Joshua Mostafa I am writing this longhand on board a barge, for the second and longer leg of a trip down the Danube via Linz to Vienna, from where I’m catching the hydrofoil to Budapest (where I’m now typing it up, and trying to make sense of the Hungarian kezboard–keyboard!–layout), then a twelve-hour train ride to Bucharest, from where I’ll be able to get out to the Carpathian mountains. These cities are simply waystations for me, stopping points to sleep as cheaply as possible between the stretches of countryside I’ve been photographing and describing in obsessively detailed notes. The…

… read more

Historical Fiction

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Historical Fiction

by Joshua Mostafa This endeavour: there are three shelves on my bookcase dedicated to it. In my citation management app, there are several hundred articles on its various aspects. And so many notes, scattered among ring-bound notebooks, online backups, and annotations: digital, or pencilled in margins. I could not begin to count my trips to the library, beginning on the campus of an obscure town in the American Midwest, and continuing in Australia, increasing both in frequency and the weight of each bag of borrowed books; I think I must have unwittingly saved enough rarely-read volumes from the Fisher Library’s…

… read more

Embracing the chaos

SoutherlyBlog1 Comment on Embracing the chaos

by Claire Scobie Trust the process. If I learned anything writing The Pagoda Tree, it is that. Except, like with any lessons, it’s easy to forget. Over the past three weeks I’ve written about the fun stuff: planning, dreaming and researching a novel. The actual writing is much thornier. From the start I knew I needed to get the scenes down, however rough. Louis de Bernieres confirmed that approach after telling me how bogged down he became researching his epic Birds without Wings. If you research first and write later there’s a danger of getting lost in the morass of…

… read more

Archive Fever

SoutherlyBlog

by Claire Scobie I’ve often found libraries sexy places to work; none more so than the British Library in London. As you walk up the marble steps, you feel the tension. Everyone is focused, everyone is busy. You can’t dawdle or daydream here. Inside the reading rooms the atmosphere is hushed. It’s this intensity, a combination of intellectual stimulation, furious study and a reverence – for books, for the written word – that fuels the headiness of the creative process. During the four years working on The Pagoda Tree I spent many weeks there. My favourite place to write and read…

… read more

Week Two: History with my feet

SoutherlyBlog

by Claire Scobie On my second visit to Thanjuvar, I interviewed the current Prince, Babaji Rajah Bhonsle, in his palace with its air of fading grandeur. I was hoping for pomp and ceremony, but he arrived in beige slacks and a pressed white shirt. He’s a modern Prince – he’s on Linked-In. As we sat drinking chai in a dark room hung with chandeliers and portraits of his royal predecessors, he mentioned we were sitting in the original harem. I felt a frisson of excitement. My character, Palani, is based on the real Muddupalani, a royal courtesan and poet who…

… read more

In search of The Pagoda Tree: a four-part series

SoutherlyBlog

by Claire Scobie Over the next four weeks I’m writing about the process I went through thinking, dreaming, researching and writing my novel, The Pagoda Tree (Penguin). Set in eighteenth-century India, this is largely told through the eyes of a temple dancer, or devadasi, named Maya whose life is transformed by the arrival of the British. After my first book, Last Seen in Lhasa, was published I suffered from second book syndrome. As with many first-time authors, my first book, a travel memoir, was a labour of love, a story I felt compelled to write because of my years going…

… read more

June monthly blogger – Claire Scobie!

SoutherlyBlog

Many thanks to Tom Lee for his excellent posts. This month, Claire Scobie will blog for Southerly. Her bio is below. Claire Scobie is the award-winning author of Last Seen in Lhasa and The Pagoda Tree, chosen by Good Reading magazine as one of their Best Fiction Reads 2013. She has lived and worked in the UK, India and now Sydney. Claire mentors writers and runs creative writing workshops across Australia and retreats in Italy. She has appeared as a panellist on ABC TV’s First Tuesday Book Club in a travel-writing special and is a regular guest at writers’ festivals. She is a member of the British Guild of Travel…

… read more

Walter’s live blogging – Claire Scobie

SoutherlyBlog

by Walter Mason Whenever I teach travel writing workshops I always ask my students what their favourite travel books are. Partly it’s because I want them to start thinking about the kind of writing they want to do, and also because I want to be sure they have some kind of grasp of the genre. Certain books and writers are constantly mentioned (Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux and Norman Lewis), but one of the books that is brought up every time is Claire Scobie’s classic piece of travel writing, “Last Seen in Lhasa.” This year Claire has published her first novel,…

… read more