Author walks tightrope between fact and fiction

The Miles Franklin Award-winning author Frank Moorhouse investigated the tension between imagination and historical research in a recent seminar at ANU.

The 2008 Coombs Creative Arts Fellow discussed the role of imagination in historical research and the contradictions between the two. “There has always been a tension between creative writers and scholars,” he said. “I’m interested in what the imagination is, and where it gets its validity from.”

“I am not a psychologist in any form, but I do know a bit about how the imagination works from my own personal experience,” he said.

He also spoke about the different types of imagination to do with dreaming, empathy, creativity and even deception, and argued that sometimes it’s hard for us to let our imagination take over. “Some authors claim that they ‘just do it’. I don’t believe that. I usually put myself into a sort of ‘isolation’ in order to think clearly and truly imagine.”

Frank used the experience of writing two of his League of Nations series, Grand Days and Dark Palace, to illustrate the research that is undertaken in order to write a historical novel. He said that the best historical novels need to be based not only on the research of scholars but on the author’s own research, so the writer can begin to imagine and have their own feelings on the topic.

Frank Moorhouse is the latest H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow, and is being hosted by the History Program in the Research School of Social Sciences. The Fellowship is administered and funded each year by the Research School of Humanities within the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences.