Joanna Kavenna
Bearing Witness
The novelist, travel writer and environmentalist Peter Matthiessen once said, ‘All truthful writers are sui generis.’ He added:
The best non-fiction has many, many virtues … yet its fidelity to the known facts is its fatal constraint [whereas] deep in a novel, one scarcely knows what may surface next, let alone where it comes from. In abandoning oneself to the free creation of something never beheld on earth, one feels almost delirious with a strange joy.
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Jan Morris, who died last week, was a much-loved contributor to our pages. In 2017, she wrote a characteristically witty article about the different winds, their various personalities and how they had touched her life: https://literaryreview.co.uk/let-it-blow.
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James Hogg—best known today for his amazing novel The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which “voluptuously tormented” André Gide—died #OTD, 21 Nov, 1835.
In this @Lit_Review article, Alan Taylor visits Hogg’s birthplace in the Borders
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-ettrick-shepherd