BLF 2026 - Workshop: On Style with Taylor Burns
Recital Hall, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
200 Jennens Road, B4 7XR
£30 - bursaries available
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Birmingham Literature Festival 2026
Workshop: On Style with Taylor Burns
As Truman Capote once put it, ‘there is such an animal as a non-stylist, only they’re not writers – they’re typists.’
In this workshop, Birmingham-based novelist Taylor Burns takes you through his thoughts on Style – its benefits, demerits, history, practitioners, looking at sentence and paragraph and how these things build a book before anything else.
Style as inescapable despite modern tendencies to overlook a writer’s sentence-making in favour of other modes of delivery: theme, plot, structure, identity, politics. Style across genres. Will a novelist’s criticism allow their style? Will a journalist’s fiction suffer without the factual scaffolding? Style is intrinsic, see. It is, as Martin Amis said, morality.
Running time approx. two hours