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Linda Proud is the author of A Tabernacle of the Sun, a philosophical novel set in Renaissance Florence. The sequel, Pallas and the Centaur, is due to be published in 2004. She is the author of seven other books, including Knights of the Grail, a sequence of stories for reading out loud to children. She has lived in Oxford for 20 years, has never got over the thrill of being on the same patch as Tolkien, Lewis and Charles Williams, and finds constant inspiration in Port Meadow. She teaches Creative Writing to students of American universities studying at Oxford. Her novels have won a broad and ardent readership for they address the questions that perplex us: Is this life all there is? In being content with material goods, is Man denying his true potential? Is the reality of the senses the whole truth? The depth of her historical research has impressed art historians and contributed to a revision of the period. She says: “There is an inner integrity to any story, and if you follow it, you come to the truth by the route of the imagination. In A Tabernacle for the Sun, for example, I ignored what all the historians said with regard to the identity of the commissioner of Botticelli’s Primavera simply because it did not fit the story I was writing. But some art historians, impressed y what I had to say, looked again at the facts, and now my ‘guesswork’ is becoming accepted as true. I am not saying that I have caused history to be rewritten, only that I guessed right”. |
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