Interview: Kate Summerscale

By Jane Tolerton In Books

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30th June, 2012
‘I love reading novels, and that’s my ideal reading experience,” says Kate Summerscale, “but I also love historical research – getting into the archives and piecing it all together.” So she writes historical novels? No. She takes a real-life historical story and writes it up into a narrative that is as much like a novel as she can make it – without making up dialogue or anything else. Using novelistic techniques is not unusual in non-fiction writing. Magazine feature writers and authors have for decades been borrowing plot devices, such as scenes and flashbacks, from novels to ...

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