Author talk as part of the 'Off the Shelf' Festival - Audrey Niffenegger

On Wednesday evening I attended my first ever 'author talk'.  This was just one of the events being held as part of the 'Off the Shelf' Festival of writers and readers in Sheffield (9 - 31 Oct 2010 details on http://www.offtheshelf.org.uk/).  I have to admit that despite this being held for a few years now I had not heard of this before.  As you can see it is held over a 3 week period and contains lots of different events including workshops and on the 30th they hold a Bookswap' event where you can take books you have read to swap for others.  This isn't a new concept for me as I do this all the time only via the post.  I use 2 different swap sites that operate in different ways.  The first one is http://www.readitswapit.co.uk/ and this works as a straight swap between members - one book for another and the second is http://www.bookmooch.com/ which works on a points basis you get so many points for each book requested from your list and you then use those points to request books from other members.

Anyhow, I seem to be digressing from the main purpose of this post.  The evening was advertised as 'An evening in conversation with Audrey Niffenegger'.  This event was held in the Pennine Lecture Theatre at Sheffield Hallam University.  The 'conversation' started as an interview, very much in a 'chat show' style of question and answer and later went to questions from the audience.  Audrey told us a little about her life and how her first novel 'The Time Traveller's Wife' was written.  She started her career writing/creating graphic novels and for a very short time she thought of doing this in this media but soon realised that it would be better in words.  She explained how she started with the title and then wrote the ending and the death of her main character and then worked back from there.  When she was later asked by a member of the audience if she was sad to kill her character off she answered with "No, because as I wrote that as one of the first things I didn't really know him, so he didn't stand a chance".  Audrey went on to talk about her graphic novels and her second novel 'Her Fearful Symmetry' which is very different to Time Traveller's Wife and is a ghost story.  This was followed by questions from the audience which covered a variety of things and finally she was available to sign our books.  All in all it was a very interesting, insightful evening.