Critically acclaimed - Jill Dawson's new novel The Great Lover
...soon to be published in America by Harper Collins in a PS edition (June 1st, 2010)
What do people know of the poet Rupert Brooke?
That W.B Yeats described him as ‘the handsomest young man in England’? That he was part of a circle that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, the painter Augustus John, James and Lytton Strachey? That he died young, on his way to Gallipoli and was thereafter taken up as a national icon, the golden boy poet of the First World War? Or possibly only that he wrote the lines: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England…’
...proof that presently its author is one of the finest practitioners of the literary historical novel...and that this is her best novel yet. Siobhan Harvey, New Zealand Dominion Post
This captivating novel gives voice to Rupert Brooke himself in a tale of mutual fascination and inner turmoil, set at a time of great social unrest. Revealing a man far more complex and radical than legend suggests, it powerfully coveys the allure and curse of charisma. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan Book Club
Click here to read more and order the book from Richard and Judy's website.
...a daring experiment, and one whose mood, setting and eccentricities linger in the mind. Joanna Briscoe, The Guardian
This brilliant, complicated man is the centre of Jill Dawson's The Great Lover, and while she draws extensively on historical records of Brooke and his contemporaries, it is her decisions as a novelist that make this account of his life fascinating as well as faithful. Helen Dunmore, The Times
Dawson has pulled off the risky gamble of reimagining history. The New Statesman
This is a seductive book, evocative and well paced, the tale split between Brooke and Nell, the two narrative voices strong, distinctive and consistent. Scotland on Sunday
The speed and rhythms of rural life, and the greater sense of the wider world of pre-war turbulence, of suffragettes laying siege to the status quo, and artists' coteries flouting convention – all this is rendered so unfussily, and in writing polished for clarity, not dazzling effect, that the reading becomes an almost physical pleasure. The Scotsman
Dawson has followed Brooke's lead, and her moving, intelligent, beautifully written and hugely enjoyable novel is alive with vivid descriptions of the world her characters inhabit. Peter Parker, Sunday Times
This is a compelling portrait of a failed love affair and of a damaged man who is so cut off from the world that, to paraphrase the book’s epigraph from DW Winnicott, he cannot allow himself to be found by those around him. Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph
To translate this well-known figure into a novel, with all his contradictions, requires capacious knowledge and a gifted imagination. Fiction and fact are here blended with sureness and subtlety.
The Independent
Jill Dawson has created a convincing world of huge pathos; a subtle, evocative anti-fairy-tale of doomed youth by one of Britain's most subtle and accomplished writers. Waterstone's Books Quarterly
Dripping with deliciously sensual allsuions to beekeeping, this is an elegantly entwined story of self-discovery and wild, poetic love. Good Housekeeping
The Great Lover is not only engaging and seductive, it is also clever, witty and artfully designed. Times Literary Supplement
Nell is a wonderfully vivid creation: resilient, intelligent and heart-breakingly innocent, she represents the other, working-class England that often gets overlooked in accounts of 'giddy young people sleep-walking towards war' as Dawson puts it.
Dawson deftly works endless ironies into the gaps between these two narratives, and manages not only an impressive evocation of Brooke's milieu but a compelling reassessment of a poet often dismissed by modern readers as a poster boy for limp-wristed, tea-sipping Toyrism. Time Out
Jill Dawson was born in Durham, and as a child lived in Staffordshire, Essex and Yorkshire. She read American Studies at the University of Nottingham, before moving to London in 1983. A year later she won both first prize in City Limits short story competition, and first prize in the Hackney New Writers Poetry competition. She published one poetry pamphlet White Fish with Painted Nails (Slow Dancer Press), and in 1992 she won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry.
Her edited books are: The Virago Book of Wicked Verse (1992) The Virago Book of Love Letters (1994). She has also edited a collection of short stories, School Tales: Stories by Young Women (The Women's Press 1990), and with co-editor Margo Daly, Wild Ways: New Stories about Women on the Road (Sceptre, 1998) and Gas and Air: Tales of Pregnancy and Birth (Bloomsbury 2002). She is the author of one book of non-fiction for teenagers, How Do I Look? (Virago Upstarts 1991), which deals with the subject of self-esteem.
In addition to poetry and editing she is the author of six novels, all published by Sceptre: Trick of the Light (1996); Magpie (1998), for which she won a London Arts Board New Writers Award; Fred & Edie (2000); Wild Boy (2003); Watch Me Disappear (2006), and The Great Lover (January 2009). Fred & Edie is based on the historic murder trial of Thompson and Bywaters, and was shortlisted for both the 2000 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction, and voted one of 50 essential novels by a living author.
Her scripts have received a number of awards from ScreenEast - one for Stunner, an original screenplay, and one for Watch Me Disappear, based on her novel of the same name. She has also received several awards from the Arts Council of England, most recently for her first novel for children, The Silver Banks. Currently Dawson is adapting Wild Boy for the screen, working with the director Andy Wilson.
Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages including French, Italian, Greek, Danish, Chinese and German and described by the Whitbread judges as 'inventing a female language where Jean Rhys leaves off'. In 2007 Dawson travelled to Russia where her second novel, Magpie, was one of ten books presented at a conference at the University of Perm on contemporary British novels. In 2008 she was keynote speaker at the National University of Singapore where she was invited by the British Council to talk about her writing.
Dawson has taught Creative Writing for many years and in many countries, including the USA, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and Switzerland. In 2003 she was the Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia where she later taught on the MA in Writing. She is currently the Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and a Board member of New Writing Partnership in Norwich.
In 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Anglia Ruskin University, in recognition of her 'exceptional giftedness' as a writer, and her work with emerging writers. She was instrumental in founding Escalator, an award for new writers, and Writers Pool. She is founder and director of Gold Dust, a mentoring scheme which matches new writers with established ones.
Dawson lives with her husband and two sons in an award-winning eco house in the Cambridgeshire Fens.
Rupert Brooke - subject of Jill Dawson's new novel The Great Lover.
