Out of the Margins

"An absolute BUGGER to stage!" 

Kate Mosse is an award-winning novelist, playwright, essayist and non-fiction writer, the author of eight novels and short story collections, including the multimillion-selling Languedoc Trilogy, The Burning Chambers Series and number one bestselling Gothic fiction The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist’s Daughter. Her books have been translated into thirty-seven languages and published in more than forty countries. The Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, she is the Founder of the global Woman In History campaign. 

Walking us through the process of adapting her own novel into a play, Kate Mosse has generously annotated throughout this first edition, with notes, scribblings and handdrawn lines helping make sense of the process. From the opening of the play, which is "an almost exact version of the opening of the novel", via all the tricky bits in the middle, to the end ("I wanted Cassie (ghostlike) to appear á la Gladiator, but the creative team said not..."), this is a full in-depth exploration of give-and-take, the non-negotiables, what got the applause, directions for sounds, how to make the flashbacks real. This really is the real deal - the novelist-playwright in her craft, reflecting on the awesome task of turning a book into a living, breathing artform.