By Niven Govinden
Lush, sensual, and atmospheric, Diary of a Film is a love letter to the creative process: how we tell our stories, and how we're changed by their telling.
Publication Date: June 14th, 2022
Hardback: 9781646051809
Paperback: 9781646054428
eBook: 9781646051816
Available in paperback: August 25th, 2026
Description
Lush, sensual, and atmospheric, Diary of a Film is a love letter to the creative process: how we tell our stories, and how we're changed by their telling.
Together with his lead actors—two men developing a burgeoning off-screen romance—an unnamed Italian filmmaker attends a prestigious European festival to premiere his latest work. Alone one morning at a backstreet café, he strikes up a conversation with a local woman, Cosima, and becomes enthralled by her life story. Following her on a walk through the city as she details her tragic relationship with a graffiti artist whose suicide shattered her life, our auteur keenly seeks out the artist's extant murals that stand as a testament to their love, eager to translate this star-crossed affair to the screen as a fragile, hopeful affair between his two actors blooms before him in real life.
Meandering through moments in time the way its characters meander the lively city streets, Diary of a Film evokes the full-body experience of falling in love: sun-drenched European cobblestones; the bubble of champagne on the lips; winding, intimate late-night conversations. Our narrator obsesses over the love he witnesses in the present and the past, and his own role in the stories he feels fated to tell. At once romantic and cerebral, Diary of a Film mines the age-old question: "How do you reconcile life and art, and not settle for a life deferred while art is being made?" (The Guardian)
Biographical Information
Niven Govinden is an award-winning writer of five novels. He was long-listed for the Jhalak Prize and short-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Polari Prize for his most recent novel, This Brutal House, which focuses on the New York ballroom scene of the 1980s.
Reviews
“This taut, allusive, and illuminating novel explores creativity and receptivity—the processes through which we make art and experience it . . . A slow fuse leads to a climactic flashpoint, putting all sorts of notions about life and art into fresh perspective.” —Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews
“These are some lovely paeans to a fading film world . . . [R]eaders can't help being seduced by the protagonist's commitment to a life of art.” —Publishers Weekly
“To read Diary of a Film, Niven Govinden's splendid and heartfelt new novel, is by necessity to recall another splendid and heartfelt novel, William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf . . . To simply outline its trajectory is to give short shrift to the alchemy by which Govinden, the author of five previous novels, so utterly occupies his narrator's mind . . . [O]ne of its many pleasures is its arresting and authoritative rendering of Maestro's cinematic eye and of the particulars of film festival premieres, with their regimen of photo ops, news conferences, and screenings.” —David Leavitt, The New York Times
“One for literary fiction fans, Niven's prose is intoxicating.” —Cosmopolitan
“A beguiling exploration of artistic obsession.” —Colin Grant, Observer
“Niven Govinden's Diary of a Film, his sixth novel, is also his best yet. Smart, sexy and cinematic (in many senses), it is a love letter to Italy and to film.” —Alex Preston, Observer
“Immersive . . . This is a wise and skillfully controlled novel that can be read in an afternoon, but which radiates in the mind for much longer.” —Financial Times
“Elegant . . . In a strong, clear tone that's unfettered by hyperbole, Govinden allows us access to the narrator's mind as he muses on love, work and who should tell whose stories.” —Monocle
“What a pleasure it is to read this love letter to art and to human connection (fragile, powerful, transforming), at a time when we're masked and lonesome and can't kiss our own hand without washing it afterwards.” —Deborah Levy, New Statesman
“A sophisticated and sensitive book about storytelling and queer kinship.” —Attitude
“Immensely talented.” —Sarah Hughes, i newspaper
“A beautiful, poignant novel of love and longing . . . This tale of a director beguilingly captures the agony of making a film and letting the public see it.” —Tim Robey, Telegraph
“Govinden's prose flows with the smooth lilt of a moving camera . . . an outstanding, luxurious novel.” —The i
“Fall into its rhythms, and a few nights at a film festival will become an existential exploration of the creative process.” —The Skinny
“It is a book about the dysfunctions of grief and about what rights the artist has to take liberties with somebody else's story. Gorgeously written, Diary of a Film is a book quite ripe, fittingly, for film adaptation.” —Literary Review
“Diary of a Film is about how art ravages and redeems. It is about the responsibility artists bear both for their art and the world that must contain it; about the imperative to create something substantial in a world that moves too quickly to capture beauty to one's satisfaction; it is about living an ideal, committing to a principle whatever the potential cost, leaping into love and trusting that it will hold you.” —Stephen Kelman, author of Pigeon English
“A wonderful meditation on why we tell stories, and who gets to tell those stories—and the grief of your masterpiece belonging only to its audience once it's finished. Sentence by sentence, one of the most beautiful novels I've read all year.” —Nikesh Shukla
“Govinden has created a work of taut and enveloping beauty, which gets to the heart of what it is to live an artistic life caught in the never-present of the piece just made and the piece as yet uncreated.” —Andrew McMillan
“Vicariously I experienced again the freedom to travel and visit a European city just to catch an exhibition, go dancing or merely escape the mundane for a weekend. Diary of a Film is about seeing the familiar in new ways, finding friends wherever we are and coming to terms with the past being the past. Set amongst the gourmet surroundings of a Northern Italian film festival, it reads like an elegy for a just-gone era.” —Paul Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk
“I truly fell in love with this book. It gifts the reader, offering complex human relationships, beautifully-written; I felt a genuine sadness when each scene ended. Reading Diary of a Film, I was powerfully reminded of the depth of the human heart, and of the work which proceeds from it.” —Okechukwu Nzelu
“A meditation on film-making, art, grief and privacy. Constructed with the skill of a watchmaker, with a precise, consistent pitch of intensity.” —Keith Ridgeway
“Precision engineered European modernism from a master stylist. It walks us into a luminous and loving conversational drama, rich with complex erotics and interwoven private agonies. He writes exquisitely about art making, about obsession and responsibility. It's a gorgeous novel.” —Max Porter
“A serious, elegant and elegiac novel: an evocative tribute to the lost world of high cinematic glamour and a lament for the artists' struggle towards greatness. When the time comes again, this is the book I'll carry to read during days spent wandering around the grandeur of a city, moving from cafe to cafe, dreaming of the beautiful life.” —Preti Taneja
“Diary of a Film is an achingly intimate novel—tender and wise like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet through the lens of Luca Guadagnino. Govinden drops us into the fray of an Italian film festival only to reveal a secret garden of quiet and stolen moments with a director whose film is about to premiere. In hotel rooms, abandoned buildings, and in a whisper in front of the international press corps, joy blooms, ideas are born, liberties are taken. Trust holds it all afloat. A stunning meditation on the art of creation and the nature of the artist.” —Saskia Vogel