Three Graves

The output is a creative work, a novel called Three Graves. Research for the novel was that of a traditional literary biography or academic monograph. I researched the life and work of Anthony Burgess, particularly his fiction on the lives of other writers (Nothing Like the Sun, about William Shakespeare, for instance), spent time researching in the Burgess archive at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and travelled to important places in his personal and creative life (most relevantly, Kuala Kangsar in Malaysia).The project aimed to explore how a work of fiction could offer more of a sense of the literary figure than a traditional literary biography. The project was also developed in response to Hans Renders’ contention that ‘the misunderstanding behind almost every biography is that a theoretical basic assumption would not be necessary for a biographer’ (Ed. Renders & De Haan, 2014, p.136). The theoretical basis I employed was Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogism. The book seeks to add to a literary dialogue Burgee evokes in his own writing, as well as an internal dialogue, between four narrator focussed characters. The novel, Three Graves, was published by Bluemoose Books in September 2021