Creative non-fiction is sometimes thought to be a ‘new’ genre of writing, but it’s been around for a while in the form of travel writing, memoir, some feature journalism and the kind of biography in which the biographer steps into the story and inhabits that space between the objective and the subjective. Think Helen Garner, Inga Clendinnen. Go even further back and think Truman Capote with In Cold Blood. Two of my favourite examples of the genre, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman and Hanifa Deen’s Broken Bangles, both date back to the 1990s. What’s ‘new’ about the genre now, other than the shiny new term ‘creative non-fiction’, is its popularity. Perhaps, in some measure, this has been fuelled by the reading public’s interest in true stories told with the use of fictional techniques, their interest in writers as players in the stories they tell, and a growing acceptance that boundaries between genres can be blurred and nobody will get hurt—although Kate Grenville might beg to differ there. Read more here ..
Bounty: Prose Poetry
2 months ago
