return to home
 
 
Member Login
Library Login
BookBrowse Mobile      twitter      Bookmark and Share      mail to a friend  Email
 
  This Week's Recommendations    |     Publishing Soon    |     Paperbacks Coming Soon    |     Recent Hardcovers    |     Recent Paperbacks
   Read-Alikes   |    Genres   |    Settings   |    Time Periods   |    Themes   |    Favorites   |    Award Winners   |    Book Finder   |    Surprise Me!
   Recent Interviews    |     All Interviews    |     Author Bios    |     Author Websites    |     Pronunciation Guide
   Free Newsletters   |    Wordplay   |    Book Giveaway   |    BookBrowse Polls   |    Literary Quotes   |    Personality Quiz   |    Gift Membership
   Recent Membership Magazines    |     Magazine Archives     |     Invite the Author    |     My Reading List    |     First Impressions    |     My Account
   Editor's Blog    |     Best Reader Reviews    |     Book News    |     Meet the Reviewers    |     Stay In Touch
   About Us   |    Tour   |    Member Benefits   |    Join   |    Gift Memberships   |    Library Subscriptions   |    FAQ   |    People Say   |    Contact Us
Search: Title or Author
Suggested Links
Books by this Author:
The Thirteenth Tale (2006)


Other Links:
Free Twice-Monthly Newsletters
Bitter in the Mouth
The Invisible Mountain

Win This Book!
Displaced Persons

Displaced Persons jacket

'Recommended for a wide range of readers, and a perfect book club choice.' - Library Journal, starred review

Enter To Win Now!


wordplay
Solve this clue:
"S A S M B M B, but W W N H M"

and be entered to win....
New Author
Interviews
Michael J. Sandel
Michael J. Sandel’s "Justice" course is one of the most popular and influential at Harvard. Interested readers can take a seat in the lecture hall alongside Harvard College students, thanks to a 2009 PBS lecture series....
Carol Lynch Williams
Carol Lynch Williams discussed The Chosen One, and what inspired her to write a book about polygamy.
C. W. Gortner
A video interview with C.W. Gortner in which he talks about his 2010 historical novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici.
Vanessa Woods
Vanessa Woods discusses her first book, Bonobo Handshake, and her experiences with the extrarodinary Bonobos.
No Stars
   Diane Setterfield: Biography

Browse a biography and interview of Diane Setterfield
Plus: Book summary, excerpts and reviews at BookBrowse.com.

Diane Setterfield
Diane Setterfield Books by this author at BookBrowse:
The Thirteenth Tale
Name Pronunciation
Diane Setterfield: die-ann seter-field

Author Interview
Biography

Diane Setterfield was born in Reading and grew up in Theale (both in Berkshire, in the South of England), she attended Theale Green School, and then Bristol University where she studied French Literature. She has taught in various universities in England and France, where she lived for several years.  The Thirteenth Tale is her first novel; her previous publications have been academic works about 19th and 20th century French literature, in particular the works of André Gide (a French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947).   She is 42, married to Peter Whittall, an accountant, and lives in Harrogate, North Yorkshire (the North of England) with their four cats where, until recently, she ran her own business teaching French to people planning to move to France.

She left academia in the late '90s, she enjoyed teaching but hated university politics and after five years was still working to pay off the loan she had taken out to fund her PhD. "I gave up my job to write before I knew what I wanted to write about," she says. "It might seem bold or brave, but really it comes down to how much you want to do something. If you want to do something so badly, then you have to take a bold decision."

She says, "I was so tired after leaving academia – I worked very hard for the final year of my job because I wanted to leave everything done right – that I just wanted to do something physical and use a completely different part of my brain".  So, she spent her first year as a novelist renovating her house and giving private French lessons.  "I was doing a lot of physical work, it was enormously good for me to be away from pen and paper, it enabled me to just wander in my thoughts and let a different side of my mind take over," she says.  "If I hadn't had the time to do that, I don't think I would have been able to write the same book I did."

When she finally sat down to start writing she spent the mornings writing and the afternoons doing "something quiet, to have some thinking time".  Then one day the voice of Miss Winter came to her and she set about a first draft which was completed 18 months later, but she was unhappy with the result. She says, "The biographer, Margaret, was very quiet and reserved and she was very difficult and withdrawn, I could tell she was hiding something from me, but I couldn't tell what it was.  I got very annoyed with the book and the characters, and didn't do anything for a year. After that I took a deep breath and sat down with it again. I couldn't leave it alone – I just felt these characters deserved to have their stories told."

Eighteen months later the book was finished, and she sent it to agents in November 2005.  Following a marathon 10-day auction, she was paid £800,000 by her UK publisher, Orion, and a further $1m by Simon & Schuster in the USA.  Rights have already been sold  in 31 countries.

The book marks "a return to that rich mine of storytelling that our parents loved and we loved as children", said Jane Wood, Orion's editor-in-chief,  "It also satisfies the appetite for narrative-driven fiction that has beginnings, middles and endings, like the great novels of the 19th century. She creates a wonderful fictional world."

In an interview with the Yorkshire Post Setterfield says that she had had the idea for The Thirteenth Tale about five years ago, "I thought of the idea and scribbled some notes down, which were then put in a draw and stayed there for a very long time. When I took them out I wrote my first draft. Later I made some major changes and I was very happy with it.  Luckily, when I attended the writing course (which she took to help her transition from academic writing to fiction, where she was spotted by novelist Jim Crace) I took down notes on everything about how to get an agent and send off work to publishers.  After that things moved quite quickly."

She goes on to say, "I read French literature almost exclusively for more than a decade, so when I left academia, I really wanted to go back to the English classics which I was loved so much as a teenager. It was very nostalgic for me to write in that sort of style."

When asked about her meteoric success (The Thirteenth Tale went to the top of the bestseller lists in the USA one week after publication) she replies that she's not used to being so busy and that she misses writing (ironically, her current schedule leaves her no time for writing).  She goes on to say, "I'm used to living a really quiet life with lots of space to think. I'm not used to being so busy and social and meeting all these people. It's not that I'm anti-social, just that I like my own company, and I've been living with people who aren't real for the past few years – I find real people a lot more demanding."  The Thirteenth Tale was published in early September '06 in the UK where it was selling moderately well (about 1,000 copies per week); however, its success in the USA gave a boost to UK sales and awareness.

Setterfield says that for many years she felt unable to write fiction at all, "I thought authors had to be orphans, or have a drug problem, or be out having lots of sex – and none of those things were me! Once I realized that the only difference between everyone else and writers is that they write, I felt I had cracked it."

When asked what has changed in her life she has to give some thought and finally admits that she has a cleaner and no longer does the washing up at home, but that she misses the latter, saying, "It was part of my quiet afternoon time when I was allowed to think".
This biography was last updated on 10/12/2006.
A note about the biographies
We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate. However, with over 1,500 lives to keep track of it's inevitable that some won't be as current or as complete as we would like. So, please help us - if the information about a particular author is out of date, inaccurate or simply very short, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and those connected with authors: If you wish to make changes to your bio, please send your complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we replace the old with the new.

Become a Member
The Brutal Telling
Editor's Choice
  •  Sep 03 
  •  Aug 31 
  •  Aug 28 
Brodeck
Phillipe Claudel
Brodeck Jacket Set in an unnamed time and place, Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar, myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck.
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
C. W. Gortner
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici Jacket From the fairy-tale châteaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen.
Bonobo Handshake
Vanessa Woods
Bonobo Handshake Jacket A young woman follows her fiancé to war-torn Congo to study extremely endangered bonobo apes - who teach her a new truth about love and belonging.
Rock Paper Tiger
Lisa Brackmann
Rock Paper Tiger Jacket American Ellie Cooper, deserted by her husband, has made a number of friends in China. But suddenly one of them disappears, and security organizations are hounding her for information. Contacted through an online role-playing game by a group claiming to be friends of Lao Zhang asking her for...
Beirut 39
Samuel Shimon
Beirut 39 Jacket An exciting collection of the best new writing from the Arab world, by thirty-nine writers under thirty-nine.
BookBrowse members say ....
Recent Reader Reviews
Brooklyn Bridge by Karen Hesse
I'm a ten year old girl who recently read this book. It was a deep, yet fun confection about growing up in the early 1900's, the time where New York ... read more
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
This book is important, yet has been largely overlooked by reviewers and book clubs. It's not just a history of Hurricane Katrina, but a personal ... read more
Three Cups of Tea by David O. Relin
This book is an amazing read. I opened it last week and I couldn't put it down. I cried a few times because I was overwhelmed by this man's ... read more
RSS RSS feed More...  
Most Viewed This Week
1. Brooklyn Bridge
Karen Hesse
2. The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
3. Three Cups of Tea
David O. Relin, Greg Mortenson
4. Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
5. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
More...
Book Club Recommendations
Everything Asian
by Sung J. Woo
Paperback (Jul/10)
What Is Left the Daughter
by Howard Norman
Hardback (Jul/10)
Half the Sky
by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn
Paperback (Jun/10)
The Thing Around Your Neck
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Paperback (Jun/10)
More...
First Impressions
Members read and review books often months before they're published. See what they think in First Impressions!
The Stuff That Never Happened
by Maddie Dawson
Four Stars            (Aug/10)
Juliet
by Anne Fortier
4.5 Stars            (Aug/10)
Bad Boy
by Peter Robinson
Four Stars            (Aug/10)
More...
   Most Recent Blog Entries
Jonathan Franzen, 'A Dickens for our Times'?
The Rights of the Reader
When Books Breed Compassion
New Twitter Hashtags for Authors and Book Lovers
rss  RSS   rss  subscribe
  Latest BookBrowse News
Publishers Weekly accepting paid reviews (Aug 26 2010)
Publishers Weekly, one of the USA's oldest publishing industry magazines, today announced that they are accepting registrations from self-published authors... Full Story
Larsson's ex-partner hits out at renaming of trilogy (Aug 23 2010)
Stieg Larsson would not have approved of the renaming of the opening book to his Millennium trilogy from "Men Who Hate Women" to "The Girl with the Dragon... Full Story
rss RSS feed More...
BookBrowse Poll
Q: At night, do you read before sleeping?
Almost always
Sometimes
Very rarely/never
HOME Submissions | Advertising | Libraries | Media Inquiries | Reviewers | Contact Us