Non Fiction
Category: Biography, Criticism, Essays, Memoir, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 376
ISBN: 9781781725221
Publication date: June 2, 2021
Price: £12.99
“When I write, I want to smash through something.”
“Writing is something without which you die.”
“New technologies have fundamentally changed what it means to be a writer.”
Just You and the Page opens in 1971, with the dramatist Michael Wall hammering out his plays on a portable typewriter. It concludes in 2020, when the novelist and academic Josie Barnard is teaching students to compose novels on Instagram. Between them are Booker prize winners; a poet whose life was changed by a profound religious conversion; a translator for whom Pushkin has meant everything; a distinguished environmental journalist; a famous diarist; a nature writer who restored a wood, and a political activist who fled her country and is writing now in exile.
Sue Gee has interviewed twelve distinctively different writers, all old friends, looking at what has shaped them: at struggle, inspiration and dedication to their art. Part memoir, part literary biography, published in extraordinary times, Just You and the Page is above all about resilience.
“I loved this wonderful and admirable book. Sue Gee has written an important celebration of friendship, solitude, writing and reading. Each portrait of her twelve writer-friends is compelling and memorable. A book to savour.” – Peter J. Conradi
Featuring:
Dramatist: Michael Wall Novelists: Anna Burns, Penelope Lively, Charles Palliser, Darragh Martin Poet: Hilary Davies Nature writer: Ruth Pavey Writer in exile: Afra Environmental journalist: Marek Mayer Diarist: Roy Strong Translator: Antony Wood Multimodal writer: Josie Barnard
Sue Gee
Sue Gee is a novelist and short story writer. She has published eleven novels, including The Hours of the Night (1995), winner of the Romantic Novel of the Year award, The Mysteries of Glass (2005), long-listed that year for the Orange Prize, and Reading in Bed (2007) a Daily Mail Book Club selection. Her most recent novel is Trio (2016). She ran the MA in Creative Writing at Middlesex University from 2000-2008 and was awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the University of London Graduate School in 2008. Since 2010 she has taught at the Faber Academy, and worked as a mentor for the Write to Life group at Freedom from Torture. With the novelist Charles Palliser she has for some twenty years run monthly author events at Stoke Newington Bookshop, under the umbrella N16 Writers & Readers. She is a frequent contributor to Slightly Foxed.
Her collection of essays about contemporary writers and their careers, Just You and the Page: Encounters with Twelve Writers, was published by Seren in May 2021.
“Writing, by its nature, is often a solitary and secluded task, with long hours spent trying to extract and communicate one’s own ideas, and is consequently one that can appear shrouded. Sue Gee’s Just You And The Page, an even dozen of literary-biography essays on writers that she’s interacted with throughout her life, doesn’t so much offer a window into the writing profession as blow a hole into its side, thus allowing readers to gawk at the specimens.”
Alex Payne, Buzz Magazine
