Shaun Usher on Diaries of Note: 'I fell in love through letter writing and now I'm fascinated by moments captured in diaries and letters'

He had, after all, spent a decade being transported into the past as he thumbed through the pages of other people’s journals and he felt it was time to start his own. "I'd never done it up until that point,” Usher says. “But it felt like such a momentous occasion that I had a real urge to record what was happening.”

Putting pen to paper triggered the start of a project that had been in the thinking for Usher for a good number of years. Almost as soon as he began his now renowned Letters of Note project in 2009, sharing some of the world’s most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters, he found himself stumbling upon dozens of diary entries from years gone by.

“I knew very early on that one day I had to do a Diaries of Note project as well and eventually a book,” he says. “And I knew that it would be a journey through the year with an entry from a different diary for each day of the year. But I just never had the time. It's by far the most difficult book I've ever edited. It's taken four, close to five, years to put together.”

Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time was finally published last month. The book gathers 366 diary entries, one for each day of the leap year, written by people from all walks of life, from Virginia Woolf to Alan Rickman, Elton John to Nelson Mandela, and countless others not touched by fame. It’s a reminder, says Manchester-based Usher, that the act of keeping a diary, however ordinary it might feel at the time, can end up offering extraordinary glimpses into someone’s life.

“The book is a celebration of diaries,” he says. “It's a celebration of all these different diarists. It's a celebration of the year. And it's a celebration of humanity as seen through these little snapshots.” Usher will be in conversation with historian and author Lucinda Hawksley at the inaugural Whitby Lit Fest this week. Actors Miriam Margolyes and Ace Bhatti will give diary readings at the event, bringing to life such voices as novelist Charlotte Brontë, artist Salvador Dali, documentarian Louis Theroux and gardener Monty Don.

The book, says 47-year-old Usher, is a culmination of his career to date, one which has seen him become somewhat of a literary phenomenon over the last decade, a sort of self-appointed custodian of some of the most intimate and revealing forms of writing. The seeds were sown back in 2002, when Usher and his now-wife Karina began communicating via letter. She had moved to Spain as part of her university course, shortly after the couple had started dating.

“We decided that it would be fun to keep in touch by letter, not exclusively, but most of our communication,” Usher says. “We just thought it'd be an interesting thing to do. And it turned out to be, I think, the best possible start to our relationship because we were almost immediately talking about things, discussing things, that I don't think we would have talked about for quite a while in another format.

“I think putting pen to paper really does open up a different part of your brain, opens you up emotionally...We wrote to each other for 10 months. And we fell in love with each other essentially through letters. That's when I fell in love with letters too. I became obsessed with letter writing and just really sad that this form of communication that brought so much to me and my now wife seemed to be dying. So I thought it'd be a great thing to try and celebrate letters.”

It would still be another six years, however, before St Albans-born Usher launched his Letters of Note website, an online museum of letters that has been visited millions of times. That grew into his best-selling book of the same name and also evolved into Letters Live, a star-studded show, in which letters are brought to life on stage. A-list actors have joined Usher to read out letters in London, New York, LA, and Venice and this year, he took the show to Glastonbury with Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon Pegg, and James Norton to name just a few.

By 2011, with sponsorship behind him, Usher was able to turn the letters project into a full-time focus, after years of a sales career he “really didn’t enjoy”. “I never knew what I wanted to do,” he admits. “At school I was an underachiever - ‘he has potential but doesn’t apply himself’ was my report every year.” Had the project not become successful, Usher maintains he’d still be doing it. “It’s a passion,” he says. “(But) I'm still pinching myself to this day.”

Diaries of Note is his 17th book, following publications on lists, speeches and many on letters. “I became very obsessed with the power of letters and their ability to transport us into the past to these specific moments in time,” he says. “I still am amazed at how much you can learn about someone or something or some time through people's letters, these purportedly private moments.”

As for diaries, “similarly to to letters but even more so they show me that nothing really changes over time - doubts insecurities and fears, we have the same now as we had centuries ago...We don't read diaries to know the events that happened, we read them to know what it felt like while that thing happened, and that's what I love. It gives you a real view into someone's life that you don't get from anything else.”

- Shaun Usher is at Whitby Lit Fest with Diaries of Note on November 7 at 7pm. For tickets, visit whitbylitfest.org.uk/