This week I finished the development of Lawrence Norfolk's website - lawrencenorfolk.com. The website is home to Lawrence's archive of non-fiction writing, as well as a venue for new short-form writing on his blog.
Lawrence is the author of several historical novels, including his first novel, the best-seller, Lemprière's Dictionary, which has been translated into 22 languages; and his latest, John Saturnall's Feast, out in September later this year.
At our first meeting we hit on the idea of the map as a metaphor for the interface: the map is one of the crucial tools in the labyrinthine research that goes into the writing of a historical novel; for all that such a novel conjures imaginary figures, their lives light onto a world which is meticulously real, right down to the ridges, alleys, and tributaries.
I spent many hours tracing the roads, rivers and canals of a certain place at a particular point in time, stripped of names and identifiable only by the memory of crossings and climbings.
