The Ugly Duckling: Join three authors who tell the age old story of transformation. James McBride (The Good Lord Bird) tells the story of a young male slave who joins the abolition movement by passing as a girl. Meg Wolitzer (The Interestings) traces the unexpected changes that occur between childhood and adulthood. And Audrey Niffenegger (Raven Girl) takes transformation to a whole other level, in the form of a coming-of-age raven trapped in human form. Moderated by David L. Ulin.
As the summer winds down and we enter the new school year, Audrey will be participating in a full-day Guardian Masterclass seminar in London entitled How to Write a Graphic Novel, which is being curated by graphic novel publisher SelfMadeHero. The following is information from the Guardian’s website which you can also find here:
Audrey was recently interviewed by Richard Fidler for ABC in Australia on various topics including Highgate Cemetery and Raven Girl. You can hear the interview here.
Audrey recently recorded a radio essay for BBC Radio 3 about ice cream which you can listen to here. It’s only up for a few days, but if you have time to listen it is there, along with essays by other writers (Audrey especially likes TC Boyle’s essay about cook outs).
Here is a link to an older but great interview at UR Chicago Magazine Online that Pawl Schwartz conducted with Audrey last year discussing, among other things, Raven Girl and Audrey’s current novel-in-progress,The Chinchilla Girl in Exile.
Greetings to everyone! We have just returned from the opening weekend of “Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger,” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The show looks amazing, and was a testament to the hard work that everyone put into it. We will post a few images in the coming days to give a sense of the exhibition, but until then, the Washington Post has posted two great articles on their website about the show and Audrey discussing her work.
"The compulsion when I'm writing has often been: 'Let's kill them all!' writes Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," in a piece for the Guardian. "I can make my characters' lives really quite miserable. I don't feel a duty to give hope or do the right thing, only to get inside the person's head and try to understand how horrendous some things might feel."
When the choreographer Wayne McGregor and the novelist Audrey Niffenegger decided to collaborate on "a new fairytale" for the Royal Ballet, it was a leap in the dark for both of them. He had never created a narrative work; she had never written for the dance stage. The result, Raven Girl, is a piece of theatre which, if flawed, glimmers with entrancing novelty and inventiveness.
Audrey’s friend Sarah McIntyre posted recently about Raven Girl on her blog, jabberwocks.livejournal.com, including some lovely illustrations. Click here for a link to her original post.
Once there was a Postman who fell in love with a Raven. So begins the tale of a postman who encounters a fledgling raven while on the edge of his route and decides to bring her home. The unlikely couple falls in love and conceives a child—an extraordinary raven girl trapped in a human body. The raven girl feels imprisoned by her arms and legs and covets wings and the ability to fly. Betwixt and between, she reluctantly grows into a young woman, until one day she meets an unorthodox doctor who is willing to change her.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) presents Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger, the first major museum exhibition of visual artist and author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. In this mid-career retrospective on view June 21–Nov. 10, 2013, Niffenegger reveals a mysterious, strange and whimsical world, both real and imagined, through 239 paintings, drawings, prints and book art.
Audrey Niffenegger knows nothing whatsoever about ballet. She’s pretty blunt about this. Originally it was because like every other struggling artist she could never afford tickets, and then later it was because she had become the kind of opera person who has season tickets and a regular opera buddy she takes to every show. But Niffenegger does know about stories and wonder and the weird.
