Posted by Joshua DeJoy, GD Creative Nonfiction Reader for 5.1
Lionel Shriver photo by Daniel Seed for The Guardian
Can fiction authors write outside of their own experiences? To ask the question is to answer it: Of course! It’s fiction, isn’t it?
At least, that’s what American-born novelist Lionel Shriver argued at the Brisbane Writers Festival on September 8 in her keynote address, “Fiction and Identity Politics,” which deals extensively with the concept of cultural appropriation. I think her speech is worth reading in full, but I’ll attempt to summarize it: fiction writers have to use experiences outside of their own in order to write compelling fiction. “This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature—prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best,” Shriver says. Continue reading