https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/s...ll-stories
Brian Lewis grew up on a tough council estate after arriving in England as part of the Windrush generation. At the age of eight he developed an interest in chess, and joined a team formed of council estate kids to take part in championships against children from generally more privileged backgrounds. Aged 12 he took on – and beat – an international chess grandmaster.
You have probably never heard of Brian, and yet he is among the thousands of people who are joining a rapidly growing trend of “ordinary” people preserving for posterity their life stories with a ghost-written autobiography. And there has been a sharp rise in demand for these services following the Covid pandemic.
“I think that during the lockdowns people perhaps started to think about their own mortality, and those of their loved ones,” says Rutger Bruining, founder and CEO of StoryTerrace, one of the fastest-growing biography services in the UK. “People couldn’t see their parents, kids couldn’t see their grandparents, and people didn’t know how long that would last.”
Yeah, it does make a certain amount of sense: during the lockdown, people had plenty of time to organise their memoirs (and ponder existential questions
).
So, have you read any of these - or indeed, written your own?
Brian Lewis grew up on a tough council estate after arriving in England as part of the Windrush generation. At the age of eight he developed an interest in chess, and joined a team formed of council estate kids to take part in championships against children from generally more privileged backgrounds. Aged 12 he took on – and beat – an international chess grandmaster.
You have probably never heard of Brian, and yet he is among the thousands of people who are joining a rapidly growing trend of “ordinary” people preserving for posterity their life stories with a ghost-written autobiography. And there has been a sharp rise in demand for these services following the Covid pandemic.
“I think that during the lockdowns people perhaps started to think about their own mortality, and those of their loved ones,” says Rutger Bruining, founder and CEO of StoryTerrace, one of the fastest-growing biography services in the UK. “People couldn’t see their parents, kids couldn’t see their grandparents, and people didn’t know how long that would last.”
Yeah, it does make a certain amount of sense: during the lockdown, people had plenty of time to organise their memoirs (and ponder existential questions

So, have you read any of these - or indeed, written your own?
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