Here at 4th Estate, we are excited to announce that we will be part of Central St Martins’ Festival of Applied Imagination on Thursday 10th December.
As part of our music-themed month on the blog, we’ve been asking our authors to talk us through four songs that have in some way shaped their writing.
Claire Lowdon says, ‘I’m the world’s worst multi-tasker: I can barely stir a saucepan of baked beans and talk at the same time. So I never listen to music when I’m reading or writing. But there’s a lot of music in my novel, Left of the Bang, and these four tracks each mean something to one of the characters.’
We sat down with the impossibly young Claire Lowdon to discuss her debut novel, Left of the Bang.
‘Write Here’ takes us into our authors’ writing spaces across the globe, where they tell us about how they go about their craft. We mark each location on the map at the bottom of each post. In this edition, Claire Lowdon reveals the secret weapon in her writing process – her grandmother.
This month’s blog theme is ‘Wish You Were Here’ – we’re jetting around the literary world to explore the concept of travel in fiction. We’ve asked some of our authors to tell us about their ideal literary holidays: here Claire Lowdon heads to the land of magic realism to experience one of the most vivid voyages in literature.
Occupation: Assistant Editor of Arete
Book: Left of the Bang
What’s it about: For failing concert pianist Tamsin Jarvis, the pressure is mounting. She thought she was happy with her adoring schoolteacher boyfriend Callum, but when Chris comes into their lives, that starts to change. In a few months Chris will be gone, leaving for his first tour of Afghanistan. Nothing seems to be working out the way Tamsin wants it to – in fact, she’s not even sure what it is she wants. Read more…