San Fernando Valley (Zoom): Writing Setting: From Italy to Britain

The San Fernando Valley Branch of the California Writers Club is pleased to welcome bestselling author Christobel Kent as the keynote speaker on Saturday, September 10 at 1:00 pm via Zoom, with a presentation titled “Writing Setting: From Italy to Britain.”

Kent has had seventeen novels published: the first four being standalone thrillers set in Italy, followed by the six novels in the Sandro Cellini Florentine detective series. Since then she has written seven psychological thrillers roughly in the ‘domestic noir’ genre, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Loving Husband. She now lives in both Cambridge and Florence with her husband and five children.

Kent will speak about her personal trajectory as a writer, and how she used a period living in Florence as her springboard to becoming an author.  Her first nine books were set in Italy, principally Tuscany – her trademark being skillful immersion in Italian life.  The books did reasonably well but her big breakthrough came when she finally turned her attention to her own country, something, she says she’d been putting off, for a mixture of superstition and prejudice that’s fairly common among writers.

The first of these homegrown works, The Crooked House, set in a part of the UK she grew up in, received critical acclaim and her second English novel, The Loving Husband became a Sunday Times bestseller and ended up selling 200,000 copies across the media. Kent is very interested in how significant setting can be in a novel, how much fun it can be to engage with and how many functions it can perform.

Follow Christobel Kent on Instagram @christobelkentnovelist.

Please note that all members of the CWC-SFV will receive a Zoom invitation to this presentation. Members of other CWC branches should contact VP/Zoom host Monte Swann by noon on September 9 at cwcsfvhost@gmail.com for an invitation. Other guests may purchase single-day admission at www.cwc-sfv.org by noon on September 9 which will be followed by a Zoom invitation. We regret we cannot accommodate late requests.