Best-selling, award-winning writers to be ‘Caught in the Creative Act’

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford and South Carolina writer Josephine Humphreys are among the writers who will participate in the fall installment of “Caught in the Creative Act,” the popular series of readings and lectures given by well-known writers, at the University of South Carolina.

“Caught in the Creative Act: Writers Talk about their Writing” will take place Mondays and Wednesdays from 5:45 - 7 p.m. in Gambrell Hall auditorium. The course runs Oct. 15 – Nov.19.

The course is free and open to the public, but registration is required. To register, send name and address to Janette Turner Hospital by mail, e-mail or fax. Contact information is as follows: “Caught in the Creative Act,” Department of English, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208; fax 803-777-9064; email jthospital@sc.edu.

Ford, a novelist and short story writer, will discuss his 2006 novel, “Lay of the Land,” part of his series featuring protagonist Frank Bascombe. Ford also won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Humphreys, a Charleston native, will discuss “Rich in Love,” her best-known novel, which was made into a movie. Humphreys won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, the Lyndhurst Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

The lineup of writers also will include Jane Hamilton, Daniel Mendelsohn, Valerie Miner and Sophie Gee.

Hamilton will discuss her second novel, “A Map of the World,” an international best-seller, Oprah book pick and movie. Mendelsohn will talk about “Lost,” his international best-seller that tells the story of his search to learn about the fates of family members who died in the Holocaust, and Miner, a novelist, essayist and short-fiction writer, will discuss her latest novel, “After Eden.” Gee, an 18th-century scholar at Princeton University, will discuss her 2007 book, “The Scandal of the Season,” a fictionalized account of the story behind Alexander Pope’s 1712 Poem, “The Rape of the Lock. Gee wrote the introduction to Pope’s poem for the Vintage Classic book series.

“Caught in the Creative Act,” in its seventh year, is an undergraduate honors course that is open to the larger community. The format calls for students and community participants to read a variety of novels, short-story and poetry collections, memoirs and literary non-fiction and then meet the authors who read from their works, discuss the creative process and answer questions.

Many award-winning authors have been featured, including Nobel laureate Derek Walcott; Pulitzer and/or National Book Award winners Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinksy, Richard Rhodes, Robert Olen Butler and Geraldine Brooks; Commonwealth Prize winner Shauna Singh Baldwin; and many other distinguished writers, from Salman Rushdie and Stanley Crouch to E.L. Doctorow and Susan Vreeland.

Hospital, creator of “Caught in the Creative Act,” is an awarding-winning writer. Her latest novel, “Orpheus Lost,” has been named to Booklist’s Top 30 novels of the year and the American Library Association’s Best 25 Books of the Year. Her previous novel, “Due Preparations for the Plague,” earned Hospital the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2003 and the Davitt Award for Best Crime Novel by an Australian Woman in 2003 by Sisters of Crime, one of Australia’s largest literary societies.

Hospital grew up in Queensland, Australia, and taught at universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States before joining the English department as a Distinguished Writer in Residence, a post previously held by the late James Dickey.

For more information about “Caught in the Creative Act,” visit the Web site: http://www.cas.sc.edu/cica/.