LINDA PROUD

About the Author

Born in 1949 in Hertfordshire, as an only child I started writing early. My first work of fiction was a story about Richard I's minstrel, Blondel, written in school notebooks. Neglecting set homework for my own projects, I did not thrive at school. Around the age of fourteen I discovered the novels of Mary Renault, set in ancient Greece, and fell in love with historical fiction, reading avidly when I should have been revising for exams. The upshot was a course in window dressing, in the 60s, at a college perilously close to Carnaby Street, the Marquee Club and Tiles disco. I was too distracted to thrive at college, although it was there that I was introduced to a life-changing book called The Hobbit by a wise tutor, weary of telling me off for not doing what I should be doing, which was copying elongated figures from mail order catalogues as an exercise in using water colour. In sending me to the library forThe Hobbit he was signalling that a) he had given up, and b) that he secretly admired my illuminated borders around pictures of women in pyjamas.

Although I hated that college, it was the source of two other major influences of my adult life: photography and the Renaissance. The latter was covered in one session of the art history module, but it was enough to show me that somewhere in the past - and not too long ago - there had been a very bright and beautiful light.

Are there still courses in window dressing? Are they as comprehensive these days? It would have been a good career, clambering about in windows, your mouth full of pins, but I was sacked from three jobs in eighteen months. I was by now a professional misfit. It was 1969 and time to drop out. I packed two bags and left home for India but only got as far as Wivenhoe, near Clacton-on-Sea, from where I migrated to a bedsit in Colchester and rediscovered childhood with a fine bunch of like-minds. All went well until a series of misfortunes plunged me into agoraphobia and a return to the parental home.

In 1971, despite suffering this profound depression, I managed to get a job in a publishing house, back in the Soho haunts of my college. But I was older now, and wiser, and preferred philosophy classes to clubs and discotheques. As a picture researcher's clerk, I could spend my time looking at photographs and transparencies. The Pre-Raphelites were very popular at the time and I handled many transparencies of their paintings. Wondering one day what 'Pre-Raphael' might mean, I went to the library and discovered Botticelli. They say that all novels begin with questions. Learning that Botticelli lived in the same time and place as Leonardo, mine was: 'What did they say to each other?' Then, on a visit to the National Gallery to see the Botticelli paintings, I stood in front of the Portrait of a Young Man, wondering who he was and why he looked so pensive.

I soon exhausted all that local libraries, including the Westminster Art Library, had to offer on Botticelli and his times. With help from friends, I gained a reading ticket for the British Library. The idea for a novel set in Florence (I didn't know it was to be three novels until later) had seeded itself in 1974, but it was to take eleven years to do the research and develop writing skills, and considerably longer to find a publisher. By the time A Tabernacle for the Sun was published by Allison and Busby in 1997, I had become a picture researcher, gone freelance, moved to Oxford, returned to full time work and then gone back freelance. Not only that, I had written and published several other books, all non-fiction.

I was commissioned to write Consider England, four essays on the elements of the nation, illustrated by the painter, Valerie Petts (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1994). Further commissions included three from Pitkin Guides: 2000 Years of Christianity, Icons, a Sacred Art, and Angels. I also wrote Knights of the Grail, stories of King Arthur for reading out loud to young children. I enjoyed working on all of these, but as commissions they didn't seem to count. Then the amazing day arrived when my agent phoned to say, 'Are you sitting down?'

A Tabernacle for the Sun won a bursary award from Southern Arts and a month's residence at the writers' retreat of Hawthornden Castle (where I wrote the first draft of The Rebirth of Venus).

I gave up picture research with the twentieth century, my skills and experience made redundant by the advent of the new technology. It had been an absolute peach of a career during the golden age of 'colour illustrated reference' (i.e. coffee table) books. But when everything became computerised, the glory vanished. My last picture research job had a wants list where about a third of the images were to be of people using computers! When I met and married David in 2000 (big romantic story which I'll tell sometime), he joined me in my work and we really did our best upgrading our systems and our knowledge, but even working together we couldn't find any enjoyment in a job where you no longer handled photographs and 'research' consisted of trawling picture libraries online using keywords.

We diversified into editorial and production work, ditching picture research as soon as we could (sometimes I weep over what has been lost in the quality of visual imagery in publishing and the extinction of the researchers, the designers and the typographers). Frustrated by the way commercial publishing is geared to books of mass appeal, and the sad decline in production values, it was a natural and easy step to found Godstow Press. The first publication was Pallas and the Centaur. The third and final novel in 'The Botticelli Trilogy', The Rebirth of Venus, was published in February, 2008.

I have worked for many years as a tutor in creative writing, mainly for American students on programmes in Oxford colleges. I am also an editor with The Writers' Workshop, reading, analysing and suggesting improvements in submiited manuscripts. David and I live in a village near Oxford, with my nonogenarian mother and two cats, Florence and Poppi. When we have any spare time - and even when we haven't but the sun is shining - we are out on our allotment on Port Meadow, either digging or having a tea break - usually the latter.

Do visit my blog if you're interested in writing and publishing.