| Profile : Zinnia Bhattacharyya | I came to Nottingham Trent University from America to complete an MA in Creative Writing. It's a tough business learning about the sweat and tears of this craft. But Nottinghamshire's rich pool of talent, from novelists and poets to playwrights and screenwriters has made it all worth the while. My favourite place for storytelling is the Ye Old Trip To Jerusalem. A true passion for the teller and the tale exists in this town, a community of writers that continuously inspires residents and visitors long after they leave. |
What is a Nottinghamshire writer doing on bookshelves in Egypt alongside Arabic literature? Small world? Hardly. Stephan Collishaw, author of The Last Girl, has successfully aroused the interests of booksellers from the American University in Cairo Press. The novel taps into the nation's love affair of stories that touch the texture of nostalgic love and bring to life the personal tragedies of individuals caught up in massive social transformation. Themes that appeal to readers of modern fiction in the region are surreal love affairs, lives in exile, and the redemptive power of the homeland. Current favourites in Egypt include Birds of Amber, Nights of Musk, The Woman in the Flask, and Love in Exile, each offering distinctive settings in Alexandria, Nubia, Iraq and Lebanon. Collishaw's novel is set in the closing days of the twentieth century, where an elderly writer wanders the streets of Vilnius possessed by the need to photograph young mothers of the city. The Last Girl captures the imagination and gives significance to the people that make up the life of the land and those who are haunted by it. Novels that blend historical fact with fiction, and the mundane with noir, as The Last Girl does, are snatched up by readers in Cairo.
 | | Stephan Collishaw |
The novel's inspiration is the city of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, one of the places Collishaw travelled to after leaving Nottingham in the late 1980s. "The year I lived there, violent crime was at its highest" he said. "Living in a city where nobody knew what the future held, made people adventurous, crazy. They drank hard and spent every penny they earned. The book was my journey back into the troubled past; an exorcism of the city's ghosts." He teaches Creative Writing to postgraduate students at Nottingham Trent University and advises his students to embrace sense of place as an imaginative device that not only adds structure and focus, but broadens possibilities for the characters' narrative
journeys. Oliver Twist just wouldn't be the same if set in Tahiti, the stormy cliffs of King Lear forewarn the ensuing family tempest and the tragic love affair of Wuthering Heights remains unforgettable due to the haunting quality of its ethereal moors. Despite writing three unpublished novels, Collishaw persisted, until he finally saw his critically acclaimed novel The Last Girl published in 2003. That persistence paid off. He received critical acclaim for The Last Girl from publications throughout Britain, Australia, the United States, and now moving on to countries like Egypt. With expanding markets throughout Egypt and the Middle East, American University in Cairo Press displays worldwide literature in their bookstores and is a springboard for Collishaw to attract new audiences. He says, "I really believed in the novel, not just in the writing, but in the story - I'm just glad that people are reading it." Among other accolades he was he placed in Granta's list of Britain's top twenty young writers and promoted in 27 libraries across the East Midlands as part of their Voices of WWII, in association with BBC2's WW2 People's War. Collishaw lives in Colwick
and is currently working on a novel set in Nottingham. |
