Celia Brayfield

Career

Celia Brayfield is best known as a novelist. After early success with the international bestseller Pearls, she focused on contemporary social comedies set in millennial London and its suburbs. In 2005 she joined the staff of Brunel University London to set up the creative writing programme there, becoming Reader in 2006 and Associate Reader in 2015. She is also a Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University and a member of the Higher Education Committee of the National Association of Writers in Education.

During her first career as a journalist she specialised in media issues with columns on the Evening Standard and The Times and contributions to many other newspapers and magazines.

Following her childhood role model, Robert Louis Stevenson, Brayfield decided to begin her writing career as a journalist and joined the Sixties magazine Nova as a trainee sub-editor. She progressed to The Observer as assistant to the women's editor, moved to the Evening Standard, hired as a media columnist by Simon Jenkins in 1974. In 1982 she moved to The Times as a television critic, and continues to contribute frequently to that newspaper's op-ed and books pages. The birth of her daughter Chloe in 1980 provided the final spur to Brayfield's ambition to become a novelist. Her Fleet Street experience of celebrity culture led to her first book as sole author, Glitter:the Truth About Fame, a non-fiction study commissioned by the legendary feminist editor Carmen Callil at Chatto & Windus. Shortly afterwards Callil commissioned Brayfield's first novel, Pearls, the first of three tremendously successful and highly controversial genre best-sellers with strong feminist themes. From the mid-1990s Brayfield progressed to novels of a more literary character, mostly contemporary comedies focused on specific social issues. Her later novels have been acclaimed, by Fay Weldon, and others for the wit, narrative mastery and acute social observation with which they tackle modern themes. Her novels have been optioned by many film producers including Cruise-Wagner/Paramount

Time Warner Books published her latest novel, Wild Weekend a comedy that transposes the eighteenth-century play She Stoops To Conquer to a Suffolk village in heyday of New Labour. Pan published her latest non-fiction book, Deep France an account of her year in a small village in the Bearn in South West France.

Brayfield developed a growing interesting in how writers learn to write while doing the rounds of promotion tours and literary festivals. Audience questions led to a series of lectures which were the foundation for Bestseller:Secrets of Successful Writing commissioned by Victoria Barnsleyat the newly launched publisher Fourth Estate. She has since written two more books about writing, Arts Reviews and, with co-author Duncan Sprott, Writing Historical Fiction.

Brayfield has judged several national literary awards, including the Betty Trask Award, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Authors Club First Novel prize. She served on the committee of management of The Society of Authors from 1995 to 1998. She has taught at the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd centre, founded W4W, a writers' workshop in West London, and until 2003was co-founder and co-director of the National Academy of Writing, which was briefly linked to the University of Central England.

Biography

Brayfield was born on 21 August 1945 in the north London suburb of Wembley Park and decided to become a novelist around the age of nine, inspired by the headmaster of the local school. She won a place at St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, West London, an academic public school with a literary and political tradition.

Her father, a dentist, opposed her literary ambitions and refused to allow her to go to university, although she spent a year as a foreign student in France, at the Universitaire de Grenoble, studying French language and literature.

Between 1988 and 2003 she was a trustee of Gingerbread, the charity for lone parents, and from 2013 has been a trustee of the Friends of Watlington Library.

She has one daughter and lives in Oxfordshire.

Publications

Fiction:

Non Fiction:""

Translations, International Publication & Film Rights Publication rights to Celia's books have been sold in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, the United States and Zimbabwe. UK editions are sold in Australia, Canada, Eire, New Zealand and South Africa. Her book Mr Fabulous & Friends was optioned by Friday Night Films 2004. Heartswap was optioned by Nicole Kidman via Cruise-Wagner Paramount, 2000. Harvest was optioned by Ian McShane for McShane Productions, 1996 and Pearls was optioned by TF1/Flach Film, France, in 1987.

Academic New Writing international peer-reviewed journal of Creative Writing, Special Edition, Routledge, 2010 Celia co-edited, with Professor Graeme Harper and Dr Andrew Green, a special edition of New Writing, a leading international peer-reviewed journal for Creative Writing, dedicated to staff and students of the Brunel Creative Writing Programme. Her own papers included in the edition: Creative Writing:the FAQ and Babelfish Babylon.

Journalism – selected articles include: