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This interview was part of the launch of Swimming with Tigers at Blue Sky cafe in Bangor, North Wales on October 15th, 2024. It’s just under half an hour long and begins with my friend Annie Williams explaining how we know each other and saying …

Swimming with Tigers is based on real historical figures associated with the surrealist movement in the 1930s. When I first started to plan my novel, I was all set to fictionalise the life of one particular surrealist: Leonora Carrington, whose life-story already reads like a …

The launch party for my novel about the women surrealists, Swimming with Tigers, took place on 15th October 2024: 100 years to the day since Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto in Paris. Our celebration was in Bangor (North Wales) at an independent café called Blue …

My soon-to-be-published novel, a historical recreation (with liberties taken) of women in the surrealist movement in the late 1930s, is called Swimming with Tigers. The title refers to a key scene in which my main character is at her lowest point and goes into the …

Friends had read my novel manuscript. Some were creative writing lecturers, some were writers themselves, and some were readers in my genre (historical literary fiction). I’d had lots of positive feedback from them but the fifty rejections I had accumulated over the years, from agents …

There will be two events to launch my novel in North Wales. Here are the details:- Launch Party Tuesday 15th October 2024 at Blue Sky Cafe Ambassador Hall, Rear of 236 High Street, Bangor, LL57 1PA UK. 7.30 p.m. til late Local lecturer and spoken-word …

It has always been my dream to see my name on the cover of a novel published by one of the big publishing houses such as Penguin, Bloomsbury or Picador. For 10 years I was motivated by this dream to revise my novel, submit it, …

I have friends and acquaintances who have no memory of me before I was writing my novel Swimming with Tigers because it goes back that far into the past. It was some time around the summer of 2008 that the idea came to me to …

At 17, literature claimed me. The stunning effect of understanding some of King Lear and the heady influence of a teacher who was a devotee of DH Lawrence (think Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society) switched me on to literature and poetry and I have …