Tim Pears is the author of eleven novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves, 1993, (awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award); In a Land of Plenty, 1997 (made into a ten-part BBC TV series); Landed, 2010; and most recently The West Country Trilogy. In 1996 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, in America.
He has taught creative writing with Ruskin College, Oxford and the Arvon Foundation, among other organisations. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Tim believes his role is to help both unleash a writer’s voice and guide his or her editing focus.
‘Tim said: “Write the novel you want to write.” I remember that.
It was so powerful. Having Tim say that gave me such release. I went home and wrote pages and pages and pages. I started a new draft. ….
'Tim gave me so much throughout the mentoring process. His extreme talent as a writer and experience as a mentor meant that he could reach in among all the flailing sentences and pull out the essence of my work and point me in the direction I wanted to go…….. Every time I left one of our meetings, I was freed up and inspired to write. Tim was generous, supportive and totally committed. Thank you Tim.’ – Alicia Drake, mentored by Tim Pears, sold her novel I Love You Too Much to Picador in the UK and to Little Brown in New York in 2017.
