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Sara Maitland

Formerly at Lancaster University

Sara Maitland

Current Teaching

Distance Learning MA in Creative Writing

Research Interests

Sara Maitland was part of the feminist writing group that produced Tales I Tell My Mother,with Zoe Fairbairns, Valerie Miner, Michele Roberts and Michelene Wandor. Her first novel Daughter of Jerusalem won the Somerset Maugham Award; she has published five more novels and five collections of short stories. Her latest book (June 2003) is On Becoming a Fairy Godmother, from Maia Press. Her radio play, Other Voices, won the Media Mental Health Award in 2002. She worked with Stanley Kubrick on AI - now a Spielberg film, and with Ruth Lingford on the prize-winning animation The Pleasures of War. She has also written an eclectic range of non-fiction, from gardening history to feminist theology.

Profile

New book forthcoming from Granta

Sara Holloway at Granta has acquired world volume rights in Sara Maitland's memoir, The Book of Silence, about her search for silence. After a noisy upbringing as one of six children, and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother amidst the busy life of a vicarage, Maitland began to crave silence more and more strongly - and discovered she had this in common with other menopausal women. Over the past five years, she has spent periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Australian bush, and a remote cottage on Skye. Her memoir of these experiences will be interwoven with the history of silence through fairy-tale and primal myth, Western and Eastern religious spiritual traditions, the Enlightenment and 20th century psychoanalysis, up to the current ambivalence towards silence in contemporary society. Maitland has now bought a small ruin on an isolated moor on the Galloway/Ayrshire border, which she is rebuilding as a hermitage. The book will culminate with her experiences of silence in this new home.

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