Lily Dunn INTO BEING with Richard Beard

Into Being

The acclaimed author of Sins of My Father shares the secrets of writing a new, transformative kind of memoir. Into being is an essential guide to writing radical and empowering memoir. Drawing on her experience as a memoirist and a teacher of creative writing, Lily Dunn presents the ground-breaking idea that the craft of memoir itself can offer a form of transformation. Dunn demystifies the memoirist's art, helping readers to find meaning in raw experience and elevate the personal to the universal. She considers compelling questions, from why our memories give greater significance to certain events to how we can write honestly without intruding too far into the lives of our loved ones. She also explores how writers are extending the memoir form to create something hybrid, playful and subversive. In an age of social media, filled with confessions, re-inventions and distortions of the self, the question of what it means to be an individual is more urgent than ever. Into being shows readers how to turn writing memoir into a journey of discovery - one that can be shared with the whole world.

Lily Dunn

Dr Lily Dunn is an author, mentor and academic. Her debut nonfiction, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling, a memoir about the legacy of her father’s addictions was on of The Spectator's and The Guardian's best nonfiction books of 2022. Her latest book: Into Being: The radical craft of memoir and its power to transform is a hybrid memoir craft book. She is also author of a work of fiction, Shadowing the Sun.

Richard Beard

Richard Beard’s six novels include Lazarus is Dead, Dry Bones and Damascus, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In the UK he has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award and longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. His novel Acts of the Assassins was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, for books that ‘extend the possibilities of the novel form’. He is also the author of five works of narrative non-fiction, including his rugby memoir Muddied Oafs. The Day That Went Missing was shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and won the 2018 PEN Ackerley Award for literary autobiography. In the US the book was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. His latest memoir/polemic is Sad Little Men, about private schools in Britain, which was a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement and the Observer. His new project is the memoir platform The Universal Turing Machine.