Alice Winn wasn’t trying to write a novel when she wrote “In Memoriam.”
After writing three novels in a row and not finding an agent for any of them, she figured it was time to move on and try something else, so she began focusing more on screenwriting. “It was while I was procrastinating on some screenwriting edits that I stumbled upon the wartime student newspapers from my alma mater, Marlborough College, that inspired me to write ‘In Memoriam,’” Winn says. “I wrote most of the first draft in a feverish, two-week period.”
Obsessed with the student newspapers, Winn read every one from 1913 to 1919. She found them to be funny, smug, naïve and entitled, put together by boys who seemed confident they would soon inherit the world. They described cricket matches and school plays and ridiculous debates, wrote playful poems about breakfast sausages and silly short stories about detectives and gardeners. They were typical teenage boys, at least until World War I broke out. Instantly, the font changed from gothic headlines to a stark, serious typeface saying “KILLED IN ACTION.”
Winn is the winner of the 2024 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for “In Memoriam” and will give a reading and participate in a moderated Q&A session about the writing and publishing of her book on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at VCU’s James Branch Cabell Library. The story tells a tale of forbidden love between two young men, following them from their sheltered English boarding school to the horrors of the Western Front in WWI.
The World War I era had special resonance for Winn. Marlborough College had a student body of about 800 students, and 749 students and alumni had been killed in the war’s battles. She recalls having an assembly every morning in the WWI memorial which could seat all the dead. The walls were engraved with the names of those killed. “It felt as if we were very much still living in the memory of the war,” she recalls. “But I’d always been interested in World War I, even before then, because there’s so much good literature from that period.”
Her research came mainly from reading primary sources such as newspapers, but also memoirs, autobiographical novels and poetry. “WWI is famous for its extraordinary poetry, perhaps because, in Britain at least, poems were less likely to be censored than other art forms,” she says. “Also, my novel is about teenagers, and I think poetry is especially good at capturing the exquisite anguish of very young people.”
Although she wrote most of the first draft very quickly, she then spent a year and a half editing it. “I think the end result is a book that looks and feels very much like the book I had in my head at the beginning,” she says. “The first draft of the book was just a very bad and stupid version of the final draft.”
Winn acknowledges that her 21st century perspective colored the way she wrote her characters. But she was determined that her characters would not feel like modern people in a historical setting, going so far as to deliberately give them opinions that would be difficult for a modern reader to agree with. “Even Gaunt, who is the more modern of the two protagonists, disapproves of the war because he feels it will weaken the British Empire, which he takes as a given to be a bad thing,” Winn explains. “I was trying to make them realistic for their time. But it’s inevitable that it was colored by my own perspective. Part of the charm of historical novels is they look at another time period through the lens of the present moment.”
Although “In Memoriam” came together quickly, her past lack of luck in finding a publisher left her feeling discouraged. Eventually she allowed a friend to send the manuscript to his screenwriting agent. “He sent it to one of the best agents in the business, and she decided to represent me,” Winn recalls. “Once she said yes, everything else fell into place extremely quickly and I sold the novel at auction exactly two weeks from the day I met her.”
Despite a bumpy road to publication, “In Memoriam” immediately garnered attention. In 2023, Winn won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the 2023 Waterstones Novel of the Year Award. In October 2024, the German translation won the Young Adult Jury Award of the German Youth Literature Awards. Now VCU has awarded it the 2024 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.
For those looking to get their own writing out in the world, Winn suggests advice lifted from Kingsley Amis’ “Lucky Jim.” Amis wrote: “Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.”
Winn insists that if you want to write a book, write a book.
“Don’t think you need to wait until you’re a better writer, just write a bad book,” she says. “But also, there’ll be some years of your life in which it will be simply impossible to write and that’s okay. You’re still a writer! It will all be good material eventually.”
The 2024 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Book Talk and moderated Q&A session with Alice Winn for “In Memoriam” takes place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 19 at James Branch Cabell Library, Room 303, 901 Park Ave.
