Hotting Up

Many exciting things are happening around The Marlowe Papers.  If you’re already on The Marlowe Papers mailing list you’ll know about most of them already, but if not, here’s a round up.

The London launch event is on Tuesday 29 May at the British Library.  The fabulous Will Self and Dr Bill Leahy will be joining me to discuss the book and the wider issues of Shakespeare, authorship and identity.  This is a public event, anyone can book a ticket, so do grab yours now if you’d like to coming along.  More here.

I’m typing this from a farmhouse in Norfolk waiting with baited breath for The Marlowe Papers to be reviewed on BBC Radio 4′s Saturday Review.  I’m a little nervous, especially given that I’m here with 15 members of my family who are insisting I listen to it with then, gathered round the wireless, rather than driving off on my own to listen to it in the car at the end of a country lane.   Added later:  very favourable, and a lively discussion. If you missed it live, you can listen to a recording of this programme via this link (13 mins in).

Read the rest of this entry »

Written on May 5th, 2012 , The Marlowe Papers
The Marlowe Papers London Launch
May 29, 2012
6:30 pmto8:00 pm

On 30 May 1593, celebrated young playwright Christopher Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl in London… or did he re-invent himself as one William Shakespeare?

Award-winning poet Ros Barber discusses her enthralling and hugely acclaimed new verse novel The Marlowe Papers with Shakespearean scholar Bill Leahy and writer Will Self.

When: Tue 29 May 2012, 18.30 – 20.00
Where: Staff Restaurant, British Library
Price: £6 / £4 concessions

Book tickets here:  http://www.bl.uk/whatson/events/event130838.html

Written on April 29th, 2012 , Events, Shakespeare authorship question, The Marlowe Papers
The Marlowe Papers at Brighton Festival
May 23, 2012
7:30 pmto9:30 pm

Sceptre is 25

Andrew Miller, Ros Barber, Jess Richards, Clare Morrall. Chaired by Dr Katy Shaw

To celebrate Sceptre’s 25th anniversary, a selection of its established and emerging authors read from their latest and forthcoming books. Andrew Miller has just won the coveted Costa Book of the Year for his sixth novel, Pure, a gripping evocation of 18th-century Paris. Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers pulls off an ‘ingenious and imaginative’ (Hilary Mantell) literary feat, conjuring a coruscating historical thriller – in verse! Jess Richards’ wildly inventive debut novel Snake Ropes invokes the magic realism of Angela Carter in a mysterious tale of an island off the edge of the map. The Roundabout Man by Clare Morrall is an acutely observed slice of modern life that maps the chasm between nostalgia and reality.

Venue: Pavilion Theatre, Brighton

Time: 7.30pm

Price: £10

Book tickets here:  http://brightonfestival.org/event/719/sceptre_is_25/

Written on April 29th, 2012 , Events, The Marlowe Papers, Uncategorized
Book as Fetish Object

 Over the weekend, the cover proof for The Marlowe Papers arrived. I swear it’s the most beautiful object I’ve ever held in my hands. The photograph doesn’t do it justice – the apple, and Fay Weldon’s quote, is in brown foil, the grub and stalk in gold. The spine is beige rather than yellow. The simplicity of the design, the ‘drawn’ lettering on the spine, the hand-crafted feel, the delicious surprise (which I have resisted revealing) on the back cover … I love everything about it. It is wonderful to think that such a beautiful looking object is going to be the container for my words. I feel valued. Which is something I know many authors, and especially many poets, do not particularly feel these days.  And for such a delicious, opulent literary object to be created in an age where people discuss the imminent Death of The Book… it feels truly special.

Perhaps it’s an antidote. I like my Kindle and have nothing at all against e-books (unlike an author friend of mine who says the ‘e’ in ‘e-book’ stands for ‘evil’). Nevertheless I love books as objects, almost to the point of fetishism. I know I would want to own this one, even if it wasn’t mine.

How thrilling, after such a long time researching and writing something I wasn’t always convinced would see the light of day, let alone snare the interest of a major publisher, that the words are so appreciated that my publisher has created something truly exceptional to hold them.  So thank you, Carole and the design team at Sceptre, thank you Jon Contino, for creating this thing of extraordinary beauty.  It almost made me cry.

Written on February 20th, 2012 , Being a writer, The Marlowe Papers Tags: ,
Out with the New, In with the Old

A couple of weeks ago I returned from London with The Marlowe Papers typescript as originally submitted to Sceptre, fresh with the pencil marks of my editor, Carole Welch, and ever since then, I’ve been working on my edits.  Carole likes to do things the traditional way, so I’ve been working in pencil also, which is somewhat unusual for me.  (I’ve been tracking changes in a new Word document nevertheless.)

As I originally conceived it, The Marlowe Papers was supposed to have been a stash of papers written by Marlowe in Elizabethan cipher which I ‘translated’ into contemporary English.  I didn’t want the language to be mock-Tudor, but nor did I want it to be anachronistic.  Nothing, I hoped, would leap out as being too modern.   Of course, I couldn’t stay in the poetic flow while looking up every word, and the work of telling the story effectively in blank verse was work enough, so very often I’d plain forget to consult the OED (online access to which was one of the happiest benefits of my being a student at the time).  But after my own editing passes and those of five writer friends willing to offer opinions in return for an early glimpse of the book I’d been banging on about for four years, I didn’t think there’d be many linguistic wristwatch-equivalents left.

How wrong I was!

Read the rest of this entry »

Written on August 16th, 2011 , Being a writer, The Marlowe Papers Tags: ,
No Money In Poetry?

If I went a little quiet for a while there, forgive me.  My agent was submitting The Marlowe Papers and I didn’t feel it was anything I should be chatting about.   As you may or may not know, we emerged with a very handsome deal from Sceptre.  I’ll be in exalted company.  Sceptre publish lots of very fine writers you’ll have heard of.

The Marlowe Papers is a little different from the other novels on their list, however, because it’s a novel in verse. Not free verse either, but blank verse: 72,000 words (at the moment, anyway) of iambic pentameter i.e.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

As if this wasn’t crazy-fool enough (as ideas go) I was also pretending to be the acknowledged greatest writer of all time.  The idea behind The Marlowe Papers is that Christopher Marlowe didn’t die at Deptford in 1593, but rather faked his death and wrote the works of Shakespeare (yes, that old chestnut)… and that The Marlowe Papers is his verse memoir. The ultimate Marlowe fiction in prose had already been written (A Dead Man In Deptford by Anthony Burgess) so I thought I’d better take different tack.  Several times in the writing of it I wondered what on earth I was doing (and why I had committed to do such an insanely difficult thing) but the truth is, I like a challenge.

Read the rest of this entry »

Written on March 18th, 2011 , The Marlowe Papers Tags:

rosbarber.com is proudly powered by WordPress and the Theme Adventure by Eric Schwarz
Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS).

rosbarber.com

Homepage of Author Ros Barber