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Rose Tremain is the 2018 Golding Speaker!

Author Rose Tremain has been announced as the Golding Speaker at the 2018 Marlborough Literature Festival. The Golding speaker opens the festival each year, and is sponsored by William Golding Ltd, in recognition of Golding’s links with the Wiltshire town. Golding grew up in Marlborough, attended Marlborough Grammar School, and later used Marlborough (renamed as Stillbourne) as the setting for his novel The Pyramid. Judy (Carver) Golding commented:

We are delighted that Rose Tremain is this year’s Golding Speaker.  Her craftsmanship and imaginative empathy give the reader and listener full measure. We look forward to hearing her.’

Tremain is perhaps best known for her historical fiction, including Restoration, winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year 1989, and her Orange-Prize-winning novel The Road Home. Tremain has been influenced by the work of Golding, particularly The Spire, and she wrote in 2012:

‘What I am doing in Restoration is different. I’m inserting an invented person into a known historical time – just as Golding did with Dean Jocelin in The Spire and as Andrew Miller has done recently with Baratte the engineer in his Costa Prize-winning Pure – and embarking on a timeless human drama, that of the individual struggling to understand his place in the world.’

Tremain’s first book of non-fiction, Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life, will be published in April 2018.

Related Resources

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  • Building work on Salisbury Cathedral began in the 1200s, and the tower and magnificent spire…