Thursday, January 12, 2012

What is Katie Ward reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Katie Ward, author of Girl Reading.

Part of her entry:
Jon McGregor is a writer I deeply admire, and Even the Dogs was my train journey reading whilst visiting relatives over the Christmas season. It’s about the discovery of a body in a council estate flat, and the damaged or drug-addled people who might have prevented the tragedy from occurring. Equally culpable are the myriad authorities who seem to have little compassion for the living, but lavish reverence and expense on the dead. Not the most festive title I could have chosen, it’s a brutal and poignant...[read on]
About Girl Reading, from the publisher:
Seven portraits. Seven artists. Seven girls and women reading.

A young orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena. An artist's servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. An eighteenth century female painter completes a portrait of a deceased poetess for her lover. A Victorian medium poses with a book in one of the first photographic studios. A girl suffering her first heartbreak witnesses intellectual and sexual awakening during the Great War. A young woman reading in a bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture. And in the not-so-distant future a woman navigates the rapidly developing cyber-reality that has radically altered the way people experience art and the way they live.

Each chapter of Katie Ward’s kaleidoscopic novel takes us into a perfectly imagined tale of how each portrait came to be, and as the connections accumulate, the narrative leads us into the present and beyond. In gorgeous prose Ward explores our points of connection, our relationship to art, the history of women, and the importance of reading. This dazzlingly inventive novel that surprises and satisfies announces the career of a brilliant new writer.
Learn more about the book and author at Katie Ward's website.

Writers Read: Katie Ward.

--Marshal Zeringue