Thanks to our lovely audience and to the endearingly modest Anne Donovan, for a great event on Tuesday night.
Anne took us through each of her novels – illustrating with readings, and elaborating on her technique. Her writing comes from language and voice; her characters initially emerge almost unbidden from her subconscious, their stories asking to be discovered through the writing process itself – like working in clay.
After this initial stage, however, much research, self-analysis, and planning goes into disciplining her work with logical structure. Her novel, Buddha Da, has been praised around the planet and translated into languages as diverse as Russian, Hebrew and Brazilian Portuguese. The greatest objections Anne has received to her use of Glaswegian English have been from, ironically, Glaswegians.
Her short story, All That Glisters, was recently made into a Bafta-shortlisted short film by Clair Lamond (a trailer of which can be seen here). Her novel, Being Emily, is about a wee lassie living in a tenement who is obsessed with Emily Bronte (mirroring Anne’s own encounter with the author, when she was thirteen). Her latest novel, Gone Are The Leaves, was inspired by a single archaic Scots word: ‘feilamort’, meaning the colour of a dead leaf.
