Creative Writing

Read our collection of short stories and poems inspired by Pepys’s journal, Other Lives in Samuel Pepys’s Diary!

The e-book is available to download for free here (opens in new tab)

You can also listen to writer Elizabeth Uter perform her story here.

More info: This collection developed from creative writing workshops and a showcase of work, which were run by author Yvonne Battle-Felton and Kate Loveman in 2022. Yvonne’s historical novel Remembered was nominated was long listed for the Women’s Prize in 2019. Kate is a leading expert on Pepys’s diary

What is the collection about? Besides describing his own life in tremendous (and scandalous) detail, Pepys’s diary offers glimpses of the lives of others. There are female servants, enslaved Black people, and other Londoners whose lives barely appear in more conventional historical records.

The workshops introduced participants to some of the latest research on the ‘unwritten lives’ in Pepys’s fascinating diary. We considered some of the challenges for fiction writers in portraying figures who did not, or could not, record their own lives. Writers were invited to transform excerpts from the diary and other sources into short creative fictions. The poetry and prose in the collection was further developed by some of the writers over the following months.

Here you’ll find lively, witty, and thought-provoking pieces about Jane Birch (a servant in the Pepys household); an unnamed deaf boy who Pepys encountered at a party; and Mingo, a young black man who had been enslaved as a child and who lived next door to Pepys in the 1660s.

Like Pepys’s diary itself (which contains material judged unprintable for hundreds of years) the collection features some offensive language, and references to sexual assault, racism, and enslavement. Unlike some other publications from the project, it is therefore very much NOT for Key Stage 1 primary school children.