Miranda France – författare

To the casual outsider, Hill Farm is a rural idyll and the perfect retreat from urban life. Yet beneath the tranquil surface lie discontent, desire and death-watch beetles.Farmer Hayes loves the land - but hates farming. His neglected wife Isabel adores her three children, but is temperamentally unsuited to life as a wife and mother. The Smith sisters have not spoken to one another for forty years, farm-hand Mikey dabbles in pyromania, while neighbour Mr Payne has fled the city, only to find a greater threat to his karma in the hedgerows of Middle England. And after one incendiary summer, all of their lives will be different...Originally published with the title Hill Farm

A funny and poignant account of life in Buenos Aires, by a young prize-winning writer.In 1993 Miranda France moved to South America, drawn to Buenos Aires as the intellectual hub of the continent, with its wealth of writers and its romantic, passionate and tragic history. She found that is was all these things, but it was also a terrible place to live.The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are famously unhappy. All over South America they are known for their arrogance, their fixation of Europe and their moodiness. Very soon, Miranda France encounters' bronca' - the simmering and barely controllable rage that is a staple feature of life in the Argentinian capital. She finds that 'bronca' has deep roots: the violence and racism of the first European settlers; the dictatorships, especially in the 1970s when so many 'disappeared'; even Evita Peron, for there was no rage to rival Evita's.

A humorous and affectionate look at modern Spain, and a celebration of the country's greatest book, from the pen of a brilliant young writer.When in 1987 Miranda France spent a year living in Madrid, the post-dictatorship ebullience was at its height. Pornography and soft drugs were legalised alongside more basic freedoms, such as divorce, party-affiliation and kissing in the street. In 1998 she returned to make a journey through the great cities and towns of central Spain - Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca and others. With the new prosperity, much has changed. But much has also endured, as she learns from the people she meets, who include a private detective, a shepherd, various nuns, two belly dancers and a Castilian separatist. She also discovers that Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE' published in 1605 and the most translated book after the Bible - is a work of genius which still helps to explain the Spanish character: today's Spaniards still suffer from Don Quixote's delusions, and are as stubborn, inflexible and unrealistic as they have always been.

'Both extremely funny and deeply sad, The Writing School examines how and why we tell our own stories. It's beautifully written and structured, compelling, wise and fabulously readable' Lissa Evans'The Writing School is an extraordinary book. It is funny, exhilarating, heart-breaking and passionate. Its delicate pulsing themes are held like a bird in the writer's confident, gentle hand' Katharine Norbury'Life, with its unexpected troughs and highs, the disciplines of teaching a creative writing course and the shadow of a family tragedy provide the focus for a memoir that brims with humour, honesty and intelligence. The Writing School taught me a lot' Elizabeth BuchanA creative writing course is a chance for reinvention. When author Miranda France sets off to teach at a residential writing school in a remote valley, she expects to meet a group of aspiring writers with the usual mix of hope and unrealised ambitions, talents and motivation.Tensions are bound to emerge over the course of the week they spend together: personalities will clash, egos will need to be tamed or gently encouraged. What France doesn't expect, as she takes her tutees through a series of exercises designed to help them explore different aspects of their writing, is that a ghost from her own life will join them.As the daily drama of the writing school unfurls, so memories resurface concerning a death that profoundly shaped the author's world when she was a teenager. Soon France's memories interweave with her present task of thinking about writing and storytelling, and she too becomes a student: asking, what is to be done with our memories of those we have lost? What is behind the urge to put lives into words? And is it ever right to tell another person's story?A delightful and unusual blend of storytelling and memoir, packed full of literary anecdote and insight from the author's own experience as well as that of other writers and poets, The Writing School is a moving and often very funny book about why people write, as well as being a uniquely generous masterclass on the art of writing itself.