Category Writers

What is fanfiction?

Fanfiction is an outlet for fan engagement, allowing readers to become writers and creators in their own right. This thriving subculture within the literary world, can be understood as a form of fiction created by passionate fans, featuring borrowed characters from popular books, movies, TV shows, or other media. Through this medium fans-turned-storytellers bring their own twists to established narratives, exploring new scenarios, relationships, or adventures.

Origin                                                                                                                                                

The concept of fanfiction may seem contemporary, primarily driven by the internet era, but its roots can be traced back much further. In fact, the origins of fanfiction can be traced to the 18th Century, shortly after the publication of Irish writer Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Readers, captivated by the titular character’s fantastical journeys, began to write and imagine Gulliver in different, invented circumstances. These early fan-written stories can be seen as precursors to what we now know as fanfiction. With the advent of the internet, fanfiction indeed found its home. Online communities and forums provided a space for fans to connect, share, and explore their creative works. The popularity of this type of fiction multiplied exponentially as fans delved into the worlds they loved, breathing life into characters and relationships that captured their hearts.

 

Authors on fanfiction

However, the phenomenon of fanfiction has not been without controversy some authors, like American author Anne Rice, have expressed concerns over this kind of writing diluting the integrity of the original characters and stories. On the other hand, writer, such as English authors Douglas Adams and JK Rowling, have embraced fanfiction, acknowledging how it can expand the understanding of their universes and foster a deeper connection with their readers.

Rowling’s stance on the subject is particularly noteworthy. While she discourages fanfiction that aims to profit from her creations, she has expressed appreciation for fans desire to write their own stories based on her characters. Fanfiction reflects the deep connection fans have with their favourite characters and universes while providing an avenue for fresh perspectives and alternative narratives. As long as there are beloved characters and captivating narratives, this type of writing will continue to thrive, providing a space where imagination knows no bounds and the possibilities are limitless.

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Who was Emily Jane Bronte?

English novelist, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was the author’s first and last novel. It is widely considered by many as one of the most incredible pieces of imaginative literature in the English canon. Let’s find out what makes it a classic.

About the author

Emily Jane Bronte was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, England. She was the fifth of six children, and the fourth daughter of Patrick Bronte and Marie Branwell. Her father was a remarkable man and a minister of the Anglican church. The author lost her mother at the tender age of three. This was the first great loss the family had to come to terms with. In 1825, Emily was sent to join her sisters Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte at school. Following the tuberculosis epidemic at the institution that claimed the life of her two elder sisters, Emily and Charlotte returned home. This incident is also mentioned in her sister Charlotte’s magnum opus Jane Eyre. Emily spent the next 10 years of her life at home, where she played, read extensively, and wrote together with her siblings in an inventive creative workshop. During one of such playful workshops, the four participated in fictional world-making, which resulted in Charlotte and their brother Branwell teaming together to create a fictional land called Angria, and Emily with her sister Anne inventing the fictional Pacific Island of Gondol.

Emily was a meticulous reader. Charlotte in her Preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights elucidated that her sister “always wrote from the impulse of nature”. However, Professor Karen O’Brien from the University of Oxford says that Emily Bronte’s lone novel is a testament to her extensive reading and understanding of the works of English poets and authors such as Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron. The first edition of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was written under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and published in 1847.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a powerful and complex story of love, obsession, and revenge over two generations. It is narrated by housekeeper Nelly Dean and framed from the perspective of a visiting outsider Mr. Lockwood. This narrative revolves around an orphan named Heathcliff, who is taken in by Mr. Earnshaw and brought to live in Wuthering Heights. The story explores the close-knit bond he forms with his patron’s daughter Catherine.

What makes it a classic?

A treatise on women social conventions were extremely important at the time when Bronte wrote this novel. Italian writer and journalist Italo Calvino, in his book The Uses of Literature, said. “A classic is a classic book because it had never finished what it had to say, and Wuthering Heights stands true to this statement. One might think of it as just a love story. Well yes, but it’s also a story of ghosts, obsession, and haunting. Where Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters predecessor, wrote about the purpose of romance and how it was intangibly linked to or ended in marriage, Emily Bronte’s sole novel is a treatise on women and tries to explore what is important to her gender other than the pursuit of marriage.

Making a statement

Through Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte changed what was possible and acceptable for women to write, and how women and men can be portrayed in fiction. Her characters challenged the social expectation that one’s emotions and how they are expressed or dealt with must be dictated by an individual’s gender. It advocated that all the things that we as people feel are not so different just because one is a man or a woman. It broke away from the tradition that dictated that women must only write about acceptable things (such as love and marriage) and elements of the domestic sphere. It objected to the idea that men (especially heroes) are not capable of emoting grief and passion or being allowed to display any negative emotions such as vengeance. Wuthering Heights is not a moralising novel and calls the hypocrisy of the society that divides people on the basis of gender, turns a blind eye to the violence it inflicts in the name of religion, set unrealistic moral expectations, and is more concerned with respectability, than working towards creating an equal society.

Emily Bronte’s exceptional imagination in Wuthering Heights, says English author Kate Mosse, “makes it clear that a woman who is an artist and a man who is an artist have the same mission-to write what we think is true and to write what we think matters, this makes her sole novel one for the ages.”

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What kind of writer is Dominique Lapierre?

French author Dominique Lapierre used a mix of reportage and historical narrative to spin stories of everlasting appeal. As the “City of Joy” and the world mourns the loss of the writer, here’s a recap of his life and times.

What separates a journalist from an activist? Where is that thin line that you cross over to become part of the story, rather than write the story? More often than not, journalists struggle with the sense of purpose when they report from a battlefield or during catastrophes being faced with the dilemma whether to help the victims or focus on reportage. French author Dominique Lapierre was in the midst of major political upheavals and poignant moments in history, whilst also reporting from war zones. When the journalist turned into an author, and turned these narratives into best-selling books, he ensured that a part of the royalties would be used for humanitarian work.

The literary world mourned as Lapierre breathed his last on December 4. Kolkata also wept, shedding tears with the world. The author who became a household name after he wrote the 1985 novel ‘The City of Joy’ was 91 when he passed away due to age-related issues. The news was confirmed by his wife Dominique Conchon-Lapierre.

Early years

Born on July 30, 1931, in Chatelaillon, France, Lapierre was born to a diplomat father and a journalist mother. He started off the journey as a writer by writing travelogues. He later started reporting for the weekly news magazine “Paris Match” in the 1950s.

Literary partnership

It was whilst he was serving in the French army that he met American Larry Collins. Lapierre was 23 then. Collins later became a journalist. The two subsequently formed a deep literary partnership that propelled them to churn out hugely successful novels.

Six bestselling books!

The collaborative literary works of Lapierre and Larry Collins saw immense success. In all, 50 million copies of the six books Lapierre wrote along with Collins have been sold. These six bestsellers are O Jerusalem! (1972); Freedom at Midnight (1975); Is Paris Burning? (1965), The Fifth Horseman (1980); Is New York Burning? (2005); and Or I’ll Dress You In Mourning (1968).

Lapierre’s ode to India

 Lapierre always had a special connection with India. He showed his love for India even through his memoir, India mon amour (2010). But it was his novel The City of Joy that made him popular with the Indian crowd. The story revolves around the experiences of a rickshaw puller. In a PTI interview, Lapierre had said that the novel was like his “song of love for India, the place where I have been coming very regularly since the last 50 years. It has been an emotional journey for me where I have got a lot of love and support from the people”.

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster (1997) is yet another book written by him. This was an investigative account of the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy based on three years of research and interaction with survivors. This he wrote in collaboration with Javier Moro. In 2008, he was awarded India’s third-highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan.

A humanitarian

Lapierre was all about writing with a purpose. As a writer and journalist, he leaves behind a legacy. What we know is that Lapierre didn’t stop with documenting the injustices but also tried his bit to address them.

His humanism is evident in how he founded the “City of Joy Aid”, a non-profit humanitarian organisation based in Kolkata in 1981. He donated a large share of his royalties to support humanitarian projects. He supported many charitable projects in India such as refuge centres for children affected with polio, NGOs, schools, rehabilitation workshops, education programmes, and so on. Likewise, the royalties from the sale of the book on the Bhopal gas tragedy were used to give free medical treatment to the victims of the disaster.

Books to movies

Is Paris Burning? and The City of Joy were later made into movies by René Clément in 1966 and Roland Joffé in 1992 respectively.

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What kind of writer is Annie Ernaux?

Using social and personal history, Annie Ernaux explores emotions such as shame, guilt, and grief, and blends them to create literary marvels. The French writer was recently awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.

She is one of the greatest chronicler of our times, weaving the social and personal history seamlessly and offering a space for collective memories and histories in literature..

Intimate, reflective, and brutally honest, Annie Ernaux’s literary works are like personal histories as well as a collective history of her times.

The 82-year-old French writer explores emotions such as shame, guilt, and grief unabashedly. Ernaux has been writing for the past 50 years. Through her writings, she shares the collective experiences and memories of her generation. She has been awarded the Nobel prize for Literature recently.

Moving away from its tradition of awarding the prestigious Nobel prize in literature to novelists, playwrights and poets, this time, the Swedish Academy has chosen to acknowledge a writer of non-fiction, something the Academy has done only a few times. The merit of a memoirist has been acknowledged thus.

How it started

It all started in 1974 with ‘Cleaned Out’, Emmaus first book. It was a fictionalised documentation about a personal trauma she had to go through. Over the course of her writings, she has tried to draw on her life experiences, and those of others around her.

Early years

Born in 1940 in Lillebonne Normandy, Ernaux and her parents moved to Yvetot where they ran a cafe. Her painful encounter with the shame of her working-class background during that period would have a profound influence on her writing years later.

Ernaux as a teacher

Ernaux taught literature at secondary school for many years. Later, she retired from teaching and focussed on writing. The Years’ published in 2008 is an outstanding work which captures her life and times over a span of six decades. The English translation of this was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize International.

Writings

In one of her interviews with the Guardian, she had said that for years she thought that through writing she could ‘avenge her whole people. few people in her family received formal education. Hence she strongly believed that she could highlight the social injustices through her writing.

Her bevy of literary works revolved around intimacy, social inequality, education as a change and so on. Her very personal experiences such as grieving, passion, classed shame, illness are also touched upon.

An ethnographer

She is often considered an ethnographer or sociologist, because her writings push the boundaries of literature, with the memoirs not just reflecting the self, but documenting the social realm from a neutral perspective as well.

Ernaux has published three autobiographical novels viz. ‘Cleaned Out’, ‘What they say Goes’, and ‘The Frozen Woman’. She has brought in a new narrative form in ‘life writing’.

For instance, in the auto-socio-biographical texts, she explores her life whilst documenting the social milieu. I remain in Darkness’ and ‘Getting Lost’ are diary extracts and in ‘Diaries of the Outside, she explores her interaction with others in public spaces such as the metro or supermarket.

In ‘Where I belong’ and ‘Return to Yvetot she has woven the narrative around the important places she came across in her life.

The feminist in her feels that the women’s revolution and the fight for equal rights are not over yet.

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What was CS Lewis famous for?

C.S. Lewis gained acclaim as a children’s author for his classic series The Chronicles of Narnia. He also gained acclaim for his popular apologetics, including such works as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. What is more, he gained acclaim as a science fiction writer for his Ransom Trilogy.

Narnia is a land of adventure and magic. Here animals talk and one’s imagination knows no bounds. There is a talking lion, there is a wardrobe that hies you away to the land of Narnia where adventures are waiting to begin.

The story chronicles the adventures of the four children, Lucy, Peter, Susan and Edmund, when they enter Narnia through an old wardrobe. There they join forces with the lion Aslan in the fight with the wicked White Witch. The Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies till date.

Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. He wrote around 40 books, reaching out to a vast section of readers including children and adults.. Lewis was also an academic. He taught English Literature at Oxford University until 1954.

Childhood

Lewis grew up in a household that gave importance to reading and education. Did you know that Lewis was more like a prodigy? He started reading at the age of three and by the age of five, he started writing stories.

The stories revolved around a fantasy land filled with “dressed animals”. This collection of early stories was published as “Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985)”.

Early years

Lewis served in France with the Somerset Light Infantry in World War I. He later started his studies at Oxford. He became a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Lewis as a writer “Out of the Silent Planet’ (1938), was his first work of fiction that garnered attention. This was followed by “Perelandra” (1943) and ‘That Hideous Strength” (1945) which were both successful. These three novels form a science-fiction trilogy that revolves around the journeys of an English linguist named Elwin Ransom. “The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition” (1936) was Lewis’ first scholarly work.

The enduring appeal of Narnia

It all started in 1950, when “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was published. Soon it was followed by a series of six stories that came to be called “The Chronicles of Narnia”, a children’s fantasy book series. The books were then adapted for the big and the small screens. With the series, its author C.S. Lewis became one of the well-loved children’s book authors.

During World War II, four 5 siblings are sent to a safe place to protect themselves from the And at this country house, in the backdrop of all the carnage of the war, they find a magic door, a door to an adventure land- Narnia. One day, Lucy, the youngest of the siblings finds a wardrobe that takes her to the land of talking animals, dwarves, giants and so on. Once she returns from Narnia, she takes her siblings to the adventure land, the place which is at war. Aslan, the talking lion, is gathering an army to fight the evil White Witch who has cursed Narnia with eternal winter. The cousins join the army and fight the war and win, eventually good triumphs over evil. For the children, the wardrobe and Narnia are their escape from the real world, but they triumph in the war they get embroiled in at Narnia. The juxtaposition of the real war with that of the war in the fantasy world of Narnia explores the themes of existence, life and its meaning.

In 1956, Lewis married Joy Davidman Gresham. Six months after their marriage, his wife was diagnosed with advanced cancer. Although her cancer went into a period of remission, the disease returned and she died in 1960. Lewis channelled all his grief into his book “A Grief Observed”, published in 1961. The 1993 biographical drama “Shadowlands” fictionalised their relationship

In 1963 Lewis wrote his last book “Letters to Malcolm.” He died at the age of 64 in 1963.

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Who was the father of popular science fiction?

English writer H.G Well is considered one of the great fathers of science fiction, for developing and popularising the genre. Let us look at his novella The Invisible Man and see what makes it relevant today.

About the author

Herbert George Wells one of the fathers of modern science fiction (sci-fi) was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley. England. He was the youngest of four children of Joseph (Joe) Wells, a gardener and cricketer-turned-shopkeeper, and his wife Sarah.

Wells had been a voracious reader from a very early age. When a broken leg immobilised him at the age of seven, the adventures his paperbound friends offered became his favourite pastime. By the time he was 13. he had already finished his first literary work The Desert Daisy, all the while excelling in school But growing up in a financially impoverished household he had to stop his formal education at the age of 14 and was employed (with his two elder brothers) to become an assistant to a draper and contribute to his family’s income. When he was fired by his first employer, he became an assistant to a chemist. This was followed by an apprenticeship under another draper, till he won a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School of Science in London at the age of 18. There he met T.H. Huxley, a vocal supporter of Darwinism and a person who will instil a love for zoology and set him up for the next stage of his life.

In school, he dedicated most of his time to literature and politics. It was during this phase of his life that he started writing in the genre we identify as science fiction and wrote The Chronic Argonauts, a story that would later turn into one of his most celebrated books, The Time Machine (1895).

The scientific romance

The Time Machine was the first example of what Wells called scientific romance. This was a blend of serious social and scientific commentary intricately woven with a fast pace entertaining page-turner. These scientific romances laid the foundation for the modem sci-fi genre.

What makes it a classic?

The individual and the society

The end of the novella reveals that Griffin is an albino, who was shunned by his fellows in university because he looked different. It is this rejection and society’s inability to look past his physical difference to the intelligent man within, that has instigated his turn to the bad side.

Griffin’s story can also be seen as a parable that educates the readers to debate the role society plays in creating the evils that plague it.

Invisibility

Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson defines sci-fi as “that branch of literature that deals with the consequence of humanity’s use of tools for manipulating nature”. In Griffin’s case, this need to manipulate oneself physically stems from the bitterness and cruelty he faced growing up and stands as a metaphor for how insubstantial and worthless people have made him feel of his appearance.

The story’s resolution with the death of the invisible man can also be seen as moral symbolising the detriments of using science and technology for selfish means instead of the betterment of the world.

The art of education

The hallmark of Well’s 50-year writing career is the lesson his stories entail. He would always say that he recognised himself as a teacher and a journalist before an artist. According to him, the function of art was to educate and enrich the lives of the people it comes in contact with.

Professor Simon James from the Department of English Studies at Durham University says that “Education is Well’s panacea (universal cure) for the social divisions that he sees in the world he inhabits. It’s about seeing the world in an informed way that allows you to address it and fix it and try to make it better.” Well’s use of sci-fi to address anxieties of the world regarding the extraordinary development of technology, to reflect on the nature and essence of humanity, and explore how we understand each other, is what makes him stand out from his peers as the indispensable proponent of the genre.

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