Hello there, internet visitors, regulars and dwellers 🙂
You just had to click on the ‘About’ section, didn’t you? Now I have to find something to say about myself, something interesting, otherwise you would have come for nothing. Which means I’m in a bit of a pickle, because I don’t really know what to say… I’ll just give you a nice little list of facts, I guess 🙂
Louise Snape’s kind of history
- Louise was born in 1990 in the Netherlands.
- She moved to France at age 4.
- She realised she wanted to become a writer at around 13, when discovering Harry Potter.
- School life became more and more stressful, diminishing the amount of writing she did – but her dream of becoming a writer didn’t fade.
- At a loss as to what to study, she chose something that came easily to her – English. (As a Dutch-French bilingual, languages seemed like an easy pick). She started university at 18, studying at the Université de Toulouse Le Mirail (now Jean-Jaurès).
- She did a Bachelor of English and a first year of a Teaching Masters before she realised that teaching teens a language they didn’t want to learn was not what she wanted. She started studying Japanese, which was – strangely enough 😉 – way more difficult than she imagined.
- During the second year of that bachelor study, she learned about something very new in France: Creative Writing studies. Three universities proposed it, and she applied two years in a row without receiving any positive offers. She had been writing in French and always though she would continue doing so, but she realised that, during her writing hiatus, things had changed, and words came more easily to her in English.
- She decided to pick up her English studies again, and did a Master of English Studies focused on translation research mostly, since that was the closest she could get to writing.
- She looked for UK universities that offered her creative writing studies and chose to go to Oxford Brookes, where she finished a Creative Writing MA.
To be continued 😉
Some other facts
Why Speculative Fiction? I guess it stems from the first books I fell in love with, and the books that my family presented to me first. The first ‘real’ novel I read was The Hobbit. Then I read The Lord of the Rings, and then Harry Potter changed my life forever. And my love for journeying among the stars comes from multiple Star Trek series that accompanied me in my youth, while Asimov’s robots have always been a source of amazement to me. So I guess that my own writing stems from the ‘what you read is what you write’ idea.
Any favourite authors? That’s a difficult question to answer. I wouldn’t be able to give you a favourite. I would of course recommend the ‘classics’ – J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, Arthur Conan Doyle, Isaac Asimov, etc. – like everyone else. I will also say that Trudi Canavan, Edward W. Robertson, Bernard Werber and Diana Gabaldon for instance are definitely worth the read. There are so many amazing authors out there; I can only dream of standing among them one day.
Mmmh, that wasn’t exactly the glorious ‘about the author’ section I had hoped for. With any luck it was still useful to you in one way or another. If not, well, you can always google some cat videos if you’re bored 😉
Louise Snape 