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Celia Brayfield is an English author, academic and cultural commentator.


Biography


Brayfield was born in the north London suburb of Wembley Park and decided to become a novelist around the age of nine. She was inspired by the headmaster of the local school. She won a place at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, West London, an academic public school with a literary and political tradition. Her father, a dentist, opposed her literary ambitions and refused to allow her to go to university, although she spent a year as a foreign student in France, at the Universitaire de Grenoble, studying French language and literature.

Between 1988 and 2003 she was a trustee of Gingerbread, the charity for lone parents, and from 2013 to 2016 was a trustee of the Friends of Watlington Library.

She has one daughter and lives in Dorset.


Career


Celia Brayfield is best known as a novelist. After early success with the international bestseller, Pearls, she focused on contemporary social comedies set in millennial London and its suburbs. In 2005, she joined the staff of Brunel University London[1] to set up the creative writing program, becoming a reader in 2006 and an associate reader in 2015. She is also a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University[2] and a member of the Higher Education Committee of the National Association of Writers in Education.[3]

During her first career as a journalist, she specialized in media issues, with columns in the Evening Standard and The Times as well as contributions to many other newspapers and magazines.

Following her childhood role model, Robert Louis Stevenson, Brayfield decided to begin her writing career as a journalist and joined Nova[4] magazine as a trainee sub-editor. She progressed to The Observer as assistant to the women's editor and moved to the Evening Standard. She was hired as a media columnist by Simon Jenkins in 1974. In 1982 she moved to The Times as a television critic, and continues to contribute frequently to the newspaper's op-ed and books pages. The birth of her daughter Chloe in 1980 provided the final spur to Brayfield's ambition to become a novelist. Her Fleet Street experience of celebrity culture led to her first book as sole author of Glitter: The Truth About Fame, a non-fiction study commissioned by the legendary feminist editor Carmen Callil at Chatto & Windus. Shortly afterward, Callil commissioned Brayfield's first novel, Pearls, the first of three highly successful and controversial genre best-sellers with strong feminist themes. From the mid-1990s Brayfield progressed to novels of a more literary character, mostly contemporary comedies focused on specific social issues. Her later novels have been acclaimed for the wit, narrative mastery and acute social observation with which they tackle modern themes. Her novels have been optioned by many film producers including Cruise-Wagner/Paramount[5]

Time Warner Books published her latest novel, Wild Weekend, a comedy that transposes the eighteenth-century play She Stoops To Conquer to a Suffolk village in heyday of New Labour. Pan published her latest non-fiction book, Deep France, an account of her year in a small village in the Bearn in Southwest France.

Brayfield developed a growing interesting in how writers learn to write while doing the rounds of promotion tours and literary festivals. Audience questions led to a series of lectures which were the foundation for Bestseller: Secrets of Successful Writing commissioned by Victoria Barnsleyat, the newly launched publisher Fourth Estate. She has since written two more books about writing, Arts Reviews and Writing Historical Fiction, co-authored by Duncan Sprott.

Brayfield has judged several national literary awards, including the Betty Trask Award, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Authors Club First Novel Prize. She served on the committee of management of The Society of Authors from 1995 to 1998.

She has taught at the Arvon Foundation and Tŷ Newydd and founded W4W, a writers' workshop in West London. Until 2003 she was co-founder and co-director of the National Academy of Writing, which was subsequently linked to the University of Central England.


Publications


Fiction:

Non-Fiction:

Translations, International Publication & Film Rights

Academic

Journalism – selected articles include:


References


  1. "People". Brunel University London. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
  2. "Our People". Bath Spa University. Archived from the original on 7 September 2016. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  3. "HE Committee :: National Association of Writers in Education ::". www.nawe.co.uk. Retrieved 16 October 2015.
  4. "Remembering Nova". www.londonmet.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 28 November 2007.
  5. Fleming, Michael (6 February 2000). "Variety". Cruise-Wagner Prods. Takes ‘Heart’ in Novel. Retrieved 16 October 2015.




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