The creative project, The Virtuoso , is a novel manuscript loosely based on the last eight years in the life of Australian-born concert pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, who rose to prominence in London in the years during and after the Second World War, before committing suicide in 1953 at the age of thirty-one. The narrator is an unnamed, fictional character who is romantically obsessed with Mewton-Wood, hence his insight into Mewton-Wood and his representation of events is severely coloured by his own desires. Although based on actual events, the manuscript is essentially a study of obsession, fantasy and creativity, and rather than providing an historical record of Mewton-Wood’s life, infers the difficulty in creating such a definitive and objective record. The exegesis, The Truth Lies Elsewhere: An Encounter with the Past through a Reading of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz , is an examination of the techniques W.G. Sebald employs in his novel, Austerlitz , to comment upon the ways we remember our public past; in particular, his use of fiction and narrative strategies to explore memory and outline the problems inherent in the translation of an event into an historical narrative. I argue that by doing this, he not only calls into question the pursuit of a knowable, singular truth in history, but also encourages an alternative approach to ‘understanding’ past events
