Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Top Ten Fictitious Biographies

I came across an article through The Guardian website titled The top 10 fictitious biographies by Jonathan Gibbs. In the article, Gibbs writes the following:
Fictionalised biographies – novels based on the life of a famous person – are ten-a-penny. And why not? They're easy enough to turn out. Other people – the actual biographers – have done the hard work. All the novelist has to do is to twist the "facts" to suit their own interpretation of the life in question, and away they go. 
n writing a novel based on the Young British Artists, I decided I wanted to do something different: write the biography of a made-up person as if they were real. The trick would not be to fool the reader into thinking they had actually existed (see William Boyd's Nat Tate, below) but to access that special kind of reading we slip into when reading something we assume is factual – by which I mean, basically: gullibility. Where a reader might ask, of character in a novel, "Now, would they really do that?" of a character in a biography the question would be, "Wow, why on earth did they do that?"
Interested in knowing which novels made the list?? Click on the link above to to find out!!

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