Award-winning biographer Frances Wilson returns to help you hone and perfect your work-in-progress.

This two-part masterclass is designed for those who have already begun work on a life-story -- whether in the form of biography, memoir, autofiction, poetry or novel – and would benefit from expert guidance to steer their work to completion.

Taught online by Frances Wilson, the acclaimed author of biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey, this two-part series will offer in-depth advice about the development of voice, structure, characterisation, interpretation and style.

Whether you are in the middle of the project or simply keen to find readers, all needs will be catered for. Although this workshop builds on the lessons of Frances’s earlier four-part masterclass series, it is not essential to have completed that course before taking this one. New participants are welcome.

Each workshop will be two hours long, and the content will be provided by you, the writers. To help Frances prepare for the sessions, you will be asked to provide a description of your project, an example of your work in progress, and an account of what you are hoping to take away from the series.

This series takes place on the afternoons of 11th and 18th December and is taught over ZOOM. Sessions run from 3pm to 4:30pm .

Frances Wilson is a biographer and critic. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her books include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (Faber, 2008, winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize), How to Survive the Titanic: Or, the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay (Bloomsbury, 2011, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography), and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey (Bloomsbury, 2016, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, and shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown, the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Biographer's International Organisation Plutarch Prize). She was a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, 2019, and is currently writing a life of D H Lawrence.