In the first of 10 podcasts from the Edinburgh international book festival we investigate the growing genre of biographical fiction with two authors who have recently added to it. Naomi Wood tells us why she was drawn to write about the four women who married Ernest Hemingway over four decades which transformed him from a penniless wannabe in a Paris garret to an alcoholic celebrity fishing off the coast of Cuba. David Park explains how his discovery that William Blake's wife Catherine signed the marriage register with an "X" sent him off on a trail that would take him from the Blakes' 18th century London to Stalinist Russia and the coast of Ireland, in portraits of three very different manifestations of spousal loyalty.
Reading list:
Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Park (Picador)
The Poets' Wives by David Park (Bloomsbury)
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