Writing a biography, especially of someone who isn’t already the subject of a published book, can mean searching for living relatives who may have documents or stories that shed light on their life, as Jane Dismore explains. Then, once you find them, you have to persuade them to let you have those stories — or […]
The challenges of researching working class lives
If you want to write fiction or non-fiction based around the court of Henry VIII or of Queen Victoria, you’ll have plenty of sources to draw on. Researching working class lives is more challenging. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, argues Esther Freeman. When writing my book – Great Women of London – one […]
The voices of the Second World War
How do you bring the voices of a period such as the Second World War to life for podcast listeners – without using cliches such as air raid sirens and Churchillian clips? Ros Taylor writes about a “remarkable” source for what people were really thinking about during WWII, and how she made archive material into […]