A New Kind of Reading - Kathleen Jones
Since 2007 I've been lucky enough to be a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. It sounds very grand, but is really just one of the most wonderful safety-nets any writer can have. The RLF has been around for nearly three hundred years, helping writers in need, including many of the most famous - like Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Dylan Thomas. It has also supported the bereaved families of authors such as Robert Burns. It relied on charitable donations, but things changed when one of its former recipients, A.A. Milne, left the RLF the copyright of his Winnie the Pooh books. The sale of some of these rights to Disney in 2001 allowed the Fund to support writers in a much more imaginative way. Fellowships were created in a number of universities which then provided a two way benefit; the university got a professional author to advise its students on the art of writing and the author received financial support for a set period of time. It w...