Coming Soon

2025 starts with the second run of the Curae prize for writer-carers; it opens on the 1st of January and you can read about it here: https://thecuraeprize.uk/

Here’s a round-up of recent news and things to come. I start the new year as Dr Vaught. I passed my viva on 5th November, subject to some small amendments and these were recently signed off by internal and external examiners. Hooray. It’s a dream come true.

March – date TBC – and I will post here – an online event about being/not being a mother. Deciding not to be, deciding to be, not being able to be, myths, idylls, pressures, falsehoods. This is with a group of writers and academics and it’s likely to be a corker.

I have at least two books going on agency submission this year and we have been drawing up lists of editors we want to connect with. The first is non-fiction. You may have seen this on announcements. It’s a literary self-help book  and this first one proposed is on magical realism. I have actually planned a series under the name Dr Bookworm Prescribes. Lots of close but accessible literary readings and ideas of things to do, be, thought and practice to try. The second is my new novel, One Invincible Summer, a novella rather than a novel. Compact – and the written style is different from my usual; it’s about what happens when a recently bereaved woman with a background of unacknowledged trauma…crosses paths with a radically different man and many other things too,  to the horror of her own mother and her three adult children. 

At the end of January something important begins, which is that then I start training as a meditation teacher. I’m a devotee and, with my background and the extended and challenging caring roles I’ve had and have and the management of chronic illness which is connected to my background, well…here is a rock. I want to pass on these skills to others.

7. My second teaching book, The Elixir – much more specifically focused on craft than The Alchemy – is out in October with Renard Press.

Some of you asked what I will be ‘doing’ with the PhD. Well it was really a sort of consolidation of things in that my published works were core to it and examined in it, but aside from some occasional postgraduate lectures, I will  really be pulling it back into publishing and my nonfiction work. It will, at some point, be on the database at the British Library and you’ll be able to access it, free. Because it’s by published works, it’s shorter and elements of it are, I am sure, more personal than one might usually expect; this is because it is, in itself, a piece of testimony and of trauma survival and I have argued for the place of magical realism within that. You’ll see!

The picture below is my sole published output autumn 2016 to winter 2024. If you are interested, I can share things on features, columns, anthologised work and things I have edited. This may change, but my approach to being in the industry is definitely to make a portfolio of work; this might not be right for you, but I am ALWAYS happy to discuss.