Drafts and scene sketches for part of novel 'The Night Raid' by author Clare Harvey

Handwritten and typed papers relating to scene 60 of the book 'The Night Raid' created for the third manuscript draft, including scenes planned, scene sketch, first draft in longhand, second draft typed up, and publisher's copyedits, relating to page 361 of the final published paperback of 2017 (which is also present and has been signed by Clare Harvey).

Clare Harvey is an alumna of the University of Nottingham (Creative Writing MA 2012). She was awarded the Exeter Novel Prize for her debut novel 'The Gunner Girl', which began as her dissertation for her university course. Clare was also project co-ordinator for the Lakeside Literacy Project, which enabled University of Nottingham student volunteers from the School of English to devise and run creative writing workshops for local city schoolchildren.

Clare was born in Barnstaple in North Devon, moving to Mauritius for two years as a child before moving to Surrey, and later returning to Devon. She read Law at the University of Leicester, but chose not to follow a legal path, deciding instead to do voluntary work in Tanzania and hitch-hike from Zanzibar to Cape Town. She then worked for an overseas charity, and obtained a journalism qualification. She has had an itinerant adulthood, working variously as a freelance journalist, radio reporter and English tutor in Nepal, Germany and Northern Ireland, and England, as the spouse of a serving soldier. As at 2017, Clare was living in Nottingham.

Clare's debut novel 'The Gunner Girl', published by Simon & Schusterwhich in 2015, was inspired by her mother-in-law's experiences during World War Two. Her second war-time novel, 'The English Agent' (published in 2017) revisited some of the same characters from her first novel. Nottingham is the setting for her third novel, 'The Night Raid', published in 2017. It features as one of the main characters, the artist Dame Laura Knight (who studied at Nottingham's School of Art and was the first artist to be made a Dame, and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy). The paper-back version was launched on board the Nottingham Express Transit tram named in honour of Dame Laura Knight, followed by a talk and signing at Lakeside Arts Centre under a painting by Knight. A fourth novel entitled 'Escape' is scheduled for publication in 2018.

No archival arrangement has been necessary. The published volume has been kept with the draft manuscripts to make comparison more convenient.

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Clare Harvey used these papers in a workshop she held for Creative Writing MA students at the University of Nottingham's School of English in 2016, and donated them to the University in 2018 following a talk and signing in conjunction with the Weston Gallery 'Collected Words' exhibition of 2017.