Louise Dean (author)

Last updated

Louise Dean
Louise Dean Headshot.png
NationalityBritish
Alma materDowning College, Cambridge
Genre
  • Literary
  • Humour
  • Historical
  • Thrillers
Years active2002 – present
Website
louisedean.com

Louise Dean is an English author. Her novels won the Betty Trask Award [1] and Le Prince Maurice Prize, [2] and were longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, [3] the International Dublin Literary Award, [4] and the Booker Prize. [3] Short stories of hers have appeared in Granta . [5] She was a finalist in the 2021 Costa Book Awards. [6] She founded and directs a worldwide creative writing school, The Novelry. [7] The Nobel Prizewinner J. M. Coetzee is among many authors to acclaim her writing.

Contents

Education

Dean went from Cranbrook School to Cambridge University, where she graduated with a degree in history from Downing College. She served as the Downing College May Ball President in 1991.

Career

Dean began as a graduate management trainee for Unilever Plc at Brooke Bond Foods in Croydon. She went into advertising in 1994, working for Chiat/Day London, which became St Lukes, then as a planning director for Bates Asia in Hong Kong in 1995/1996 and at Fallon McElligott Berlin in New York in 1996/1997, before quitting to start an advertising agency in Manhattan. By 2001, Dean had written her first novel and left advertising to pursue writing full time, moving to Provence until 2007, when she returned to live in Kent with her children. [8]

Her novels – Becoming Strangers (2004), This Human Season (2006), The Idea of Love (2008), The Old Romantic (2010) – have received worldwide attention. Her first won the Betty Trask Award and Le Prince Maurice and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her latest was an Oprah Book Club choice. [9]

Becoming Strangers was called a "pageturner" by The Guardian, whose reviewer compared her style to Alan Bennett's. [10] It was one of The Observer's top five books of 2004. [11] When published in the US, Dean was compared to John Updike by the San Francisco Chronicle, who called the novel of "breathtaking" and "extraordinary" and a promise of a "spectacular career". [12]

This Human Season, her second novel, is set in The Troubles in Northern Ireland and was likewise praised. The Daily Telegraph declared it had surpassed her first. J. M. Coetzee wrote, "With clear-eyed compassion, and with all the resources of the novelist's art, Louise Dean leads us through those terrible days when for a while Belfast was a vortex for the worst of the world's cruelty and pain." Reviewing This Human Season for The Guardian, the novelist Ali Smith called Dean an eloquent architect of strengths and shapes of passion, and remarkable in her harshly lyrical delineations of the lives of women and girls... [This Human Season] is a novel which captures a community's resilience and its humour full of broken glass. Louise Dean describes the exact glint of this spirit."

Described as a "Brit Lit Star" in the US ("Brit Lit star lives up the hype." Ladies Home Journal), Dean was seen in The Guardian as "an audacious arrival in British fiction. She is unafraid to tackle unsexy or unsafe material." [13]

In 2005 The Observer dubbed Dean a "significant voice in British fiction" [14] and The Wall Street Journal called her one of the world's five most underrated authors. [15]

Dean's Le Prince Maurice prize in 2006 involved an all-star ceremony in Mauritius with Tilda Swinton hosting. She was described by The Independent 's John Walsh as "a giggly blonde dreamboat, who swears like a Folkestone docker and extends her long, slender body like an Anglepoise lamp.... Louise Dean read from a work-in-progress that contained a swaggering reference to anal sex.... The hotel bar erupted. We could have been in Las Vegas. You could say Ms Dean rose to the occasion. In her long, spider-patterned silk frock, she was transformed under the hot lights into an instant star, a flash-popping vision of perfect teeth, hair, bright eyes and décolletage. The literary world has found its Charlize Theron." [16]

Her third novel, The Idea of Love (Penguin 2007), is a dark story of a pharmaceutical salesman peddling anti-depressants while dealing with a breakdown. It was hailed as an "unforgettable study of the dark side of the mind" by The Times [17] and an "enormous delight" by The Independent. [18]

The Old Romantic, her fourth novel (Penguin 2010), has widower Ken try to reunite his family in rural England while romancing an undertaker. Boyd Tonkin commented, "Like its predecessors, it channels the rough music of everyday life for non-Bloomsbury folk with a tragicomic subtlety, a pin-sharp ear for dialogue and a flair for every nuance of character and class. Beneath the mordant delights of observation lies a sharp awareness of the grander themes – love, selfhood, family, freedom and above all death – that haunt minds and shape lives in Kentish cottages, and executive-style new-build homes, as much as Kentish castles. Admirers of Beryl Bainbridge still grieving her loss should find solace here." [19]

In 2017, Louise Dean founded The Novelry, a creative writing school for novelists. [20] [21] By 2021, the team of tutors included bestselling authors and The Novelry was working with leading global literary agencies to get new writing talent published via Dean's fast-track novel-writing courses. [7]

In 2021, Louise Dean was a finalist for the Costa Book Award for Short Story. [22]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> American author (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine Chidgey</span> New Zealand writer

Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. She has published eight novels. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elif Shafak</span> Turkish novelist, essayist and womens rights activist (born 1971)

Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neil Griffiths (novelist)</span> British novelist

Neil Griffiths is a British novelist, and the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses. He is the winner of the Authors' Club First Novel Award, and has been shortlisted for best novel in the Costa Book Awards.

Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.

Ross Raisin FRSL is a British novelist.

Francis Spufford FRSL is an English author and teacher of writing whose career has seen him shift gradually from non-fiction to fiction. His first novel Golden Hill received critical acclaim and numerous prizes including the Costa Book Award for a first novel, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Ondaatje Prize. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aminatta Forna</span> Scottish writer

Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Wenham-Jones</span> British writer (1962–2021)

Jane Wenham-Jones was a British author, journalist, presenter, interviewer, creative writing tutor, and speaker who lived in Broadstairs, Kent, a town that appears in four of her novels.

Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Evans</span> British novelist, journalist and critic (born 1972)

Diana Omo Evans FRSL is a British novelist, journalist and critic who was born and lives in London. Evans has written four full-length novels. Her first novel, 26a, published in 2005, won the Orange Award for New Writers, the Betty Trask Award and the deciBel Writer of the Year award. Her third novel Ordinary People was shortlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2019 South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. A House for Alice was published in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claire Fuller</span> English prize-winning novelist, short story writer and essayist, born 1967

Claire Fuller is an English author. She won the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize for her first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, the BBC Opening Lines Short Story Competition in 2014, and the Royal Academy & Pin Drop Short Story Award in 2016. Her second novel, Swimming Lessons, was shortlisted for the 2018 Royal Society of Literature Encore Award. Bitter Orange, her third, was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent novel, Unsettled Ground, won the Costa Book Awards Novel Award 2021 and was shortlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction

Louise O'Neill is an Irish author who writes primarily for young adults. She was born in 1985 and grew up in Clonakilty, in West Cork, Ireland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patrice Lawrence</span> British writer and journalist

Patrice Lawrence MBE, FRSL is a British writer and journalist, who has published fiction both for adults and children. Her writing has won awards including the Waterstones Children's Book Prize for Older Children and The Bookseller YA Book Prize. In 2021, she won the Jhalak Prize's inaugural children's and young adult category for her book Eight Pieces of Silva (2020).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sally Rooney</span> Irish author

Sally Rooney is an Irish author and screenwriter. She has published three novels: Conversations with Friends (2017), Normal People (2018), and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). The first two were adapted into the television miniseries Normal People (2020) and Conversations with Friends (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jo Baker (novelist)</span> British writer

Jo Baker is a British writer. She is the author of six novels, including Longbourn. She has also written short stories for BBC Radio 4 and reviews for The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review. In 2018, she was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Queen's University Belfast, and she is currently an Honorary Fellow at Lancaster University.

Oyinkan Braithwaite is a Nigerian-British novelist and writer. She was born in Lagos and spent her childhood in both Nigeria and the UK.

Jessica Townsend is an Australian author known for the children's fantasy novel series, The Nevermoor series. Her debut novel Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow won the Book of the Year Award at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2019 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature. At the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature Nevermoor won both the Premier's Award for best overall published work and the Children's award. It also won the 2018 Waterstones Children's Book Prize for Younger Fiction. Film rights to Nevermoor were sold to 20th Century Fox in 2016. Screenwriter Drew Goddard has been selected to adapt the screenplay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingrid Persaud</span> Trinidad and Tobago-born writer, artist, academic

Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidad and Tobago-born writer, artist, and academic, who lives in the United Kingdom. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017, with her debut effort The Sweet Sop. The story is about an estranged father and son reunited through their shared love for chocolate.

Polly Ho-Yen is an English author who writes books for both younger and older children and has also written a novel for adults

References

  1. ↑ "Society of Authors' Awards | The Society of Authors". www.societyofauthors.org. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  2. ↑ John Ezard (29 May 2006). "t's no Booker, but a free trip to Mauritius will do". The Guardian . Retrieved 13 July 2010.
  3. 1 2 "Interview: Louise Dean". the Guardian. 1 May 2005. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  4. ↑ "2006 Longlist – DUBLIN Literary Award" . Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  5. ↑ "I watched a man kill himself". Granta. 1 August 2008. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  6. ↑ "Booker longlistee and Palme D'Or winner make Costa Short Story shortlist | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  7. 1 2 "The Novelry reveals expansion plans after 'massive growth' in pandemic | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  8. ↑ "Country matters of the heart: Louise Dean returns to her roots". The Independent. 19 August 2010. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  9. ↑ Dean, Louise. "The Old Romantic". Oprah.com. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  10. ↑ "Review: Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean". the Guardian. 21 February 2004. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  11. ↑ "Stephanie Merritt on the best fiction of 2004". the Guardian. 5 December 2004. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  12. ↑ Conover, Patricia (8 January 2006). "Marriages unraveling in paradise". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  13. ↑ "Review: This Human Season by Louise Dean". the Guardian. 13 May 2005. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  14. ↑ "Interview: Louise Dean". the Guardian. 1 May 2005. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  15. ↑ Crossen, Cynthia (25 July 2011). "Dear Book Lover: Underappreciated Authors". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  16. ↑ "The Prince Maurice award: The luxury literary prize". The Independent. 31 May 2006. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  17. ↑ Atkins, The Sunday Times reviews by Lucy. "Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg and The Idea of Love by Louise Dean". The Times . ISSN   0140-0460 . Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  18. ↑ "The Idea Of Love, by Louise Dean". The Independent. 14 August 2008. Retrieved 16 November 2021.
  19. ↑ "The Old Romantic, By Louise Dean". The Independent. 31 March 2011. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  20. ↑ "Louise Dean launches 90-day writers' community". The Bookseller. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  21. ↑ "Louise Dean". www.thenovelry.com. The Novelry. Retrieved 18 June 2023.
  22. ↑ "2020 Costa Book Awards Names Its Three Short Story Finalists". Publishing Perspectives. 13 January 2021. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.