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Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer 

Publication 5 October 2023

In 2020 Sarah published her group biography of three British writers and their travels to South Africa in the closing days of the Victorian era, Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War, which was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer covers the five years of her research for and writing of that biography. It is about South Africa then and now and Britain then and now, about imperialism and the beginning of its end, about the biographical process, and also about living with the painful chronic condition of polymyalgia rheumatica. 

Order from the publisher: https://www.silverwoodbooks.co.uk/product/9781800422629/talking-to-the-dead-by-sarah-lefanu

or through this universal link: https://mybook.to/TttD_SLeFanu

Doings of Doyle podcast

Released October 2023

Listen to Sarah’s interview with Doyle scholars Mark Jones and Paul Chapman of the website Doings of Doyle: https://www.doingsofdoyle.com/2023/09/42-something-of-themselves-with-sarah.html

They discuss Arthur Conan Doyle, his love of uncanny tales in general and those of J. S. Le Fanu in particular, his imperialism and how it differs from that of Rudyard Kipling and of Mary Kingsley (as Sarah has written about in Something of Themselves), his role in the Boer War, and the art and craft of biographical writing. 

‘The Art of Rambling’

Sarah’s essay ‘The Art of Rambling: Journeys through Space and Time with Mary Kingsley, Rose Macaulay, Ursula Le Guin, Naomi Mitchison and Octavia Butler’, adapted from her keynote speech for the University of Silesia’s conference A Suitcase of Her Own: Women and Travel, has now been published in the conference collection in the journal Postscriptum Polonistyczne. You can read it here: 

https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/PPol/issue/view/1144

Image by Valery Milovic, https://brokentoyland.com/