Books

Read the world’s first Instagram novel

'Hey Harry Hey Matilda', the first first project of its kind to use the multimedia potential of Instagram. – AFP/Relaxnews pic, October 14, 2015.'Hey Harry Hey Matilda', the first first project of its kind to use the multimedia potential of Instagram. – AFP/Relaxnews pic, October 14, 2015.Photographer, writer and photo editor Rachel Hulin is behind "Hey Harry Hey Matilda", a novel currently unfolding, post by post, on social network Instagram.

Twitter has been used on several occasions as a platform for authors, who use the site's 140-character format to unveil their stories, serial-style.

Among them, David Mitchell published his short story "The Right Sort" as a series of 280 tweets, and notable authors such as Margaret Atwood have contributed original works to the Twitter Fiction Festival.

"Hey Harry Hey Matilda", however, is the first project of its kind to use the multimedia potential of Instagram. Hulin, author of the 2013 children's book "Flying Henry", is behind the picture-driven storytelling experiment.

Her story focuses on 30-something twins Matilda and Harry Goodman, who exchange details of their daily lives in a series of emails that unfold for readers as captioned Instagram posts. Photos and the occasional video form the basis of these posts, which see the twins navigate their lives and share their thoughts, from the mundane to the existential.

Hulin says her story is about "love, life, lies and growing up", and her posts touch on everything from kissing to Brazilian bikini waxing to the Large Hadron Collider.

Interested readers can tune into instagram.com/heyharryheymatilda to follow along with the novel as it unfolds; Part One, minus the photos, can also be found at www.heyharryheymatilda.com.

At the same website, readers can also subscribe to receive Matilda and Harry's letters and the accompanying photos in weekly instalments. – AFP/Relaxnews, October 14, 2015.

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