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Whenever I was asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said a writer (except for a short period when I wanted to be an ecologist and save the world and furry animals). Looking back, this ambition was probably related to my reluctance to distinguish between reality and fantasy. I liked telling and living in stories. I can remember standing in Furzehill Primary School playground, telling the other children that I had been born on a train travelling overnight across Europe and, therefore, had not one nationality but many. I convinced myself this was true, sort of. After all, my mother was a German speaking Italian, namely a South Tyrolean, and my father an English speaking, anglicised German.
I had something like verbal dyslexia, speaking in malapropisms and smashing words together (to wit ‘a frying flog’). Learning other languages badly became a habit. From the age of eleven, I was sent on language exchanges to Austria, France and Germany. In my gap year, I won a competition that took me to Israel for six months -where I failed to learn Hebrew or Arabic. Meanwhile it seemed that I was set on an academic trajectory. I studied Anthropology at Cambridge and Demography at the LSE. Then working in a demography department in Brussels I learned to understand Flemish and was mainly forbidden to try speaking it by my friends. Afterwards I learned Portuguese during the nearly two years I spent in Brazil conducting fieldwork for my doctorate; living for much of that time in a favela. Words, languages, are the material from which stories are spun. I like to think that my sorry efforts were not wasted.
And still I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. In my teens I wrote a terrible novel, in my twenties I wrote a screenplay – hoping to learn how to write dialogue. It wasn’t until 1994, when I was in my mid-thirties at Harvard, that I finally bit the bullet and signed up for a creative writing course. Rosa appeared on the page almost immediately. She was intoxicating. In all my previous dabbling in writing I had never been able to find an authentic voice. When Rosa arrived, I knew I could run with her.
When I returned to England, I gave up academia and worked for a development agency. I quit my job when I couldn’t face abandoning my twelve-week-old daughter. I became a domestic goddess, failed to set jam, knitted, sewed a dirndl very badly for a sing-a-long Sound of Music and taxied my daughters around.
Over the years I took novel and script writing courses, including a Diploma in Creative Writing from UEA with Louise Doughty as my supervisor. While my daughters were at school – never over weekends, evenings or holidays – I wrote a long fantasy dystopia before coming back to Rosa. At the time I called it Bathroom Stories, then renamed it Mirror, Mirror; as such it was longlisted for the Bridport First Novel Prize in 2016. It was emotionally resonant that I was on holiday in South Tyrol when I heard that Hodder had offered me a contract to publish it as The Dressmaker of Paris.
In 2018 I published A Hard Fall, on my own imprint, Mulberry Publishing, under the name G. L. Kaufmann. It is a very different beast being a near future political dystopia. But I still squeezed a love story in there.
Since 1995, I have lived within cycling distance of central London. I have been meeting with the same writing group, in various forms, for twenty years. I am working, slowly on my next novel, about another brilliant Italian woman.
If you want to read a bit more about the stories behind my work please visit: https://georgiakaufmann.com
In another life I would have been a photographer. Please follow my wannabe attempts on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgiakaufmann/
I occasionally post little stories on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GeorgiaKaufmannAuthor
And tweet not just about writing on: https://twitter.com/GeorgiaKaufmann
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