Friday, December 07, 2007

What is Diane Purkiss reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Diane Purkiss, coauthor of the Corydon trilogy, written with her son Michael under the penname Tobias Druitt, and several highly regarded scholarly works.

Her entry opens:
I always have several books going at once - one lives in my bag so I'm never caught without something to read, and I dig it out in any queues, delays, missed appointments, on public transport.... In my bag now, I have Nell Stroud's autobiographical Josser, about life in a circus; it's much funnier and more touching than Angela Carter, but I'm reading it for the purposes of working on my fifth novel with my son; one of the characters is a trapeze artist. [read on]
Diane Purkiss is a Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford.

Her latest book is The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain.

Other books include the highly acclaimed The Witch in History and At the Bottom of the Garden. She holds a B.A. from the University of Queensland, and a Ph.D. from Merton College, Oxford. She lives in Oxford, England.

She is now working on a history of food and eating.

Writers Read: Diane Purkiss.

--Marshal Zeringue