ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on biographical writing in connection to archival research, specifically, on the use of ‘biofiction’. It offers a corollary discussion that might be read usefully alongside Norwood’s account. Contributors to Life Writing essays are often authors of published works of nonfiction and seeking to reflect on and think through disciplinary questions in relation to form, genre, ethics that have been encountered through the act of creating a life-writing text. The kind of work that is published in Life Writing as Essays, and collected here for this special issue, might best be described as part of a continuum. Like other peer-reviewed academic nonfiction, essays in general mobilise evidence-based and verifiable information about a topic or experience but, unlike most academic writing, they may also juxtapose this to an overtly personal or subjective point of view.
