Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Emily Dickinson – Breathing Life into a Legacy
“She was not daily-bread. She was star-dust.” Martha Dickinson Bianchi on Emily Dickinson The Belle of Amherst’s poetry lives on. It’s been almost 130 years since Emily Dickinson’s death, and yet her works are as popular as ever, with over 1,600 scholarly articles published about her poetry in the last 25 years. Yet whilst her […]
Female Friendships in Literature
Men have dominated the friendship scene in books throughout literary history. Pip and Herbert, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Frodo and Sam, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, Romeo and Mercutio. The list goes on and on. Straight forward, no nonsense bromance at its best. Delve into the archives for a history of female friendships however, […]
The Novelistas – A Great Group of Writing Friends
The NW Novelistas (also known as Novelistas Ink) are a group of friends, who also happen to be writers, and meet each month for lunch, writerly gossip and mutual support. The group was founded over fifteen years ago by Sunday Times bestselling author Trisha Ashley, and as you can see from our latest books , […]
The Connection With Readers
When my debut novel was published, the component of the writing life furthest from my mind was arguably the most obvious. Readers. It wasn’t as if the novel was the first time my work that had made it into print. As a freelance journalist, I’d seen my byline for years, but the satisfaction it engendered […]
Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life
I was a Hasidic woman, from age fifteen to forty-five. You’ve seen them, the Jewish ultra-orthodox, the men in beards and hats and black clothes, the women in long modest covered, even covering their hair. I had an arranged marriage to a Hasidic man while still a teen and bore seven children, birth control forbidden. […]
Guilty Landscape
It started with the following tweet. Loving Someone Else's Conflict by @AlisonLayland. Gripping & sensitive portrayal of Balkans conflict and its aftermath #amreading — Louisa Treger (@louisatreger) April 7, 2015 I immediately knew I had to read this novel and a few weeks later I had it in my hands. To my surprise I found […]
My Culinary Route To Publication
Occasionally I’m asked about how difficult I found it to get a publishing contract. The short answer is that in 2011, I emailed my novel to an agent and then spent a year polishing it before I got a two-book deal. The long answer is – well, go fetch yourself a cup of coffee (and […]
Self-publishing – What I’ve Learned
Eighteen months ago I self-published my novel Dappled Light, based on the life of James Stewart, a medical missionary whose reputation was tarnished by a liaison with Mary Livingstone, wife of the explorer. Stewart subsequently married my great great aunt Mina, the daughter of a wealthy Scottish shipbuilder who was himself the subject of a […]
16 Things Sexist Male Writers Say to Female Writers
Before we even ordered our beers, he had found five ways to insult me. This wasn’t a date. This was a meeting between two writers. We had presumably come to the bar to brainstorm and critique each other’s work like adults. I quickly learned that he saw this as a competition. I guess he considered […]
What Bugs Me As A Reader
I finished a novel last night and I hated it! It began well, great characters with potential. Then, halfway through, the main character is shot dead. The family moves away and the husband heads off somewhere foreign to start a new life, leaving his two little kids with an aunt who never featured before. The […]
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