Lyn Hughes
I was born South Wales, UK, in 1952, and spent eighteen years in South Africa before finally settling in Australia in 1982. You could say I'm a child of the commonwealth. I've got two amazing grown up kids, three gorgeous grandkids and an adorable (and adoring) partner of some twenty years. I've written four novels--"The Factory"(1990), shortlisted for the National Book Council's New Writing Award; "One Way Mirrors" (1993), "The Bright House" (2000) and, most recently, "Flock", a novel about wallpaper, published in 2011 by HarperCollins 4th Estate. I'm currently at work on a fifth novel, "The Name of the Crime" an atmospheric (I hope!) Gothic tale of whaling at the turn of the century, and the violent death of a child, set in the Azores, Newfoundland, and Australia. If you'd like to learn a bit more about me, you can find me blogging and musing at lynhughes.com.au (where you can also find a Vimeo compilation of some of the beautiful wallpapers featured in "Flock") or on twitter @lynflock.
About "Flock"...
My fourth novel, Flock, takes as its background the world of wallpaper as it interweaves the story of the talented Sprigge family with that of four young conservators who come together to restore an historic house and find themselves in turn restored. Flock ranges freely between the French Revolution, Victorian England and the Blue Mountains as it explores the nature of love and the joys and challenges of living a creative life.
About the process of writing it...
Writing Flock was enormous fun. And left such an evocative residue that wherever I am I still can't help but notice wallpaper, be it in movies, advertising or the print media. In the ten years it took to research and write the novel, I travelled halfway around the globe, from the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, to the Atacama desert in Chile, and the fabulous Chateau Champlitte in rural France, where I saw my very first "scenic" or "panoramic" wallpaper (one of which, originally chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy, still remains pasted up in The White House!). Over the years, I discovered a fascinating, hidden world, peopled by historians, researchers, conservators, designers and devotees of wallpaper, as I soon became the more I learnt about this fragile, ephemeral and fascinating stuff. I was also astonished to discover that not since Charlotte Perkins Gilman's seminal "The Yellow Wallpaper", has there been a fiction about wallpaper. So you could say Flock is unique. Writing and researching it was certainly a unique and memorable experience. I hope you enjoy reading it.
