Day One: Connected

Saturday November 22nd

What Agents Want
Panel Debate - with Camilla Hornby (Curtis Brown); Anna Power (Johnson & Alcock) and Juliet Pickering (AP Watt).

Do you have what it takes to impress the agents? Will that novel you’re thinking of dedicating years of your life to actually sell? Update your understanding of the market and its demands with this panel of agents who offer varied expertise. Including Q and A.

Agents Manuscript Consultations

A naïve approach to a publisher or agent can damage your chances of getting published. A market-savvy writer might have a better chance. If you’d like some individually-tailored advice before sending off your manuscript then book a slot with one of the agents. They can give you invaluable feedback on your manuscript and pitch, and help you to find out if you’ve got what it takes.

Getting There with Erica Wagner

Erica Wagner offers tips from the frontline, using her experience as a highly-experienced writer, journalist, author and poet.  Her  talk will cover how she "got there" in her career, and where "there" really is, and will include advice about how to make it in the current climate, emphasising versatility, hard work, luck, and the ability not to give a damn. Including QandA and interview.

About Erica Wagner

Erica Wagner works as Literary Editor of The Times. In 1997 she published a book of short stories, Gravity , and three years late, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters . Her stories have been widely anthologized and broadcast on the radio and her poems have appeared in The TLS and PNReview. Erica edits and writes a weekly column for the Books section of The Times and reviews and writes articles. She’s interviewed such writers as Seamus Heaney, Donna Tartt, Maurice Sendak, Philip Pullman, Gitta Sereny, Paul Auster, Alan Garner, Peter Ackroyd, Bill Bryson and Nick Hornby. She reviews regularly for The New York Times, and also appears frequently on the radio and on television. She has been a guest on such programmes as Today, Front Row and The Culture Show. Erica has judged many literary prizes and sits on the Executive Committee of PEN and on the Advisory Committee of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Connected Keynote with Giles Foden
Know Your Rights

We are at a crucial juncture in the history of intellectual property. The author of The Last King of Scotland, Giles Foden will deliver a talk on how writers can face up to the challenges and opportunities of the new landscape. The talk will cover how cross-media platforms affect writers; what digital rights consist of, and how the practising writer can protect themselves against the machine-like operations of big media. The talk will also consider whether writers can benefit from the scramble for content going on around them. Including brief interview & Q&A.

About Giles Foden

Giles Foden was born in Warwickshire in 1967 but grew up mostly in Africa. In 1993 he became assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement. Between 1996 and 2006 he worked on the books pages of The Guardian, during which period he published his debut novel The Last King of Scotland, which won the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award. He is author of two other novels — Ladysmith and Zanzibar — and a work of narrative non-fiction, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth. In 2006 Foden was awarded an AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2007, the Oscar-winning film of The Last King of Scotland was released. One of this year’s MAN Booker judges, Foden is currently completingTurbulence, a novel about the weather forecast for D-Day.

Networking Session

Open to pass holders and invivited guests. A welcome from NWP, with wine & nibbles: meet and chat to other participants, panellists, speakers, writers and agents at New Writing Season 2008.