Prominent Australian author Jean Bedford has begun a three-month appointment as writer-in-residence at the University of Queensland.
Ms Bedford will be at the St Lucia campus until the end of April following an invitation from Jan McKemmish, senior lecturer in creative writing in the English Department.
The author of 10 books to date, Ms Bedford will spend some time on her own writing but mostly she expects to be reading manuscripts from creative writing students.
She once worked as a publisher's editor and has been running her professional eye over the students' work checking everything from spelling and grammar to dialogue, characterisation and story structure.
She is also available to discuss writing with students and staff, and will be delivering a few lectures and talks. One of the topics will be her novel If with a Beating Heart which is taught at honours level in the English Department.
One of her best known and certainly best selling books (around 60,000 copies so far) is Sister Kate which has become embedded in many high school English courses.
Ms Bedford said it was a strange feeling to have people poring over and dissecting her work but it was great that some of the writers being studied today were 'still more or less alive'.
Born in England in 1946, Ms Bedford worked in publishing and as a journalist, with some small writing successes, before deciding to embark on her first book. The result was Country Girl Again, a collection of short stories, published in 1979.
Each book may take her between two and three years to complete. The writing, including at least three drafts, gets done in some long, solid chunks with less-productive periods in between.
Ms Bedford said that was not the way she would advise any aspiring writer to work - regular disciplined writing every day was the way to do it.
But Ms Bedford said she was 'naturally lazy' and tended to perform better under pressure. Writing under contract to a publisher, often with an advance already paid (and perhaps spent!), provided the spur she needed, and once started she tended to work very fast.
About a year ago she and her husband, crime fiction writer Peter Corris, moved from New South Wales to Queensland and have chosen to live on Coochiemudlo Island, in Moreton Bay.
Mr Corris is a prolific author with about 50 books under his belt - thrillers, detective novels, spy novels, biographies, historical novels - many featuring the detective hero Cliff Hardy.
Three of Ms Bedford's books are detective novels which have sold well while the latest, Now You See Me, Jan McKemmish describes as 'very good, very dark, a classical thriller'.
Ms McKemmish, who is supervising 10 MA creative writing students this year plus two PhD students, has had three novels published herself.
'It's fabulous for me to have her here. It's great to have another writer in the department to talk to and to send students along to talk to her.'
Ms McKemmish said the English Department had hosted writers-in-residence before. However, this was the first one for creative writing though hopefully not the last.
'I would like to see this become an annual feature. It would be good to invite some overseas authors, while they are in Australia for festivals, book promotions or whatever, to spend perhaps two or three weeks at the University.'
Ms McKemmish said hosting a writer-in-residence was a big gesture on behalf of the University which was providing matching funding with the Literary Fund of The Australia Council.
For further information, contact Jean Bedford (telephone 3365 2135).
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