About Jill Dawson

Jill Dawson’s latest novel The Bewitching tells the 16th century true story of a nine year old girl who playfully accuses a neighbour of being a witch and sets in motion a shocking train of events. It will be published on July 7th 2022 and can be pre-ordered here.

Jill is the author of eleven novels, one poetry collection and the editor of six anthologies of poetry and stories. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been a Costa Judge, and taught creative writing in many different settings.

Her novels
The Language of Birds tells the story of the nanny murdered in the 1970s in Lord Lucan’s household and was published 2020. The Crime Writer is about the novelist Patricia Highsmith’s time in Suffolk and won the East Anglian Fiction of the Year, Book of the year and the New Angles runner up prize. Fred & Edie was short-listed for The Whitbread and Orange Prize and Watch Me Disappear was long-listed for the Orange Prize. The Great Lover, about the poet Rupert Brooke, published in 2009, was a best-seller and a Richard and Judy Summer Read. Lucky Bunny tells the life of Queenie Dove, East End thief and good time girl and won a Fiction Uncovered Award. The Tell-Tale Heart was described by Hilary Mantel as ‘an uncanny and atmospheric novel by a skilful storyteller’ and long-listed for the Folio prize. All are published by Sceptre.

'Dawson is a novelist everyone should know about'
– Grazia

Paperback edition of The Language of Birds
now available from Sceptre.

In addition to the fiction Jill has edited six anthologies of poetry and short stories, including the best-selling Virago Book of Wicked Verse. She has won awards for poetry, short stories and screenplays. She was joint winner of the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2013. In the USA four of her most recent novels are published by Harper Collins. Jill has taught Creative Writing for many years and in many countries, including the USA, Australia, Indonesia, France, Singapore, Morocco, Portugal and Switzerland. She has taught for the Arvon Foundation, the Faber Academy, the Guardian/UEA and for the Sunday Times/Oxford Summer School. She held the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where she also taught on the MA between 2003 – 6. She’s been Chair of the Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellows since 2008 and was a Board member of Writer’s Centre Norwich 2004 – 2011. In 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Anglia Ruskin University. She was instrumental in founding Escalator, an award for new writers, and is founder and director of Gold Dust Mentoring Writers, which matches new writers with established ones, and has helped many new writers reach publication.

Dawson lives with her husband, teenage son and foster daughter in an award-winning eco house in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

Photography by Joanne Coates.

Interview with Harper’s Bazaar
October 17, 2023The novelist Jill Dawson spent her twenties dabbling in spells and spirituality, but it was through studying the tarot that she ultimately discovered deeper, more meaningful truths. Read the interview here (PDF) [...] Read more...
The Bewitching – Guardian review – pacey witch trial tale
August 1, 2022This powerful novel foregrounds the violent misogyny behind 16th-century accusations of witchcraft in Huntingdonshire. In recent years, female writers have found their imaginations energised by the figure of the witch. Standouts include AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches, which won the 2021 Desmond Elliott prize, and Elle McNicoll’s children’s novel, A Kind of Spark. Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock features an 18th-century teenager running from accusations of witchcraft, while Jenni Fagan’s Hex, published this year, draws on a 16th-century Scottish witch trial. Jill Dawson’s new novel, The Bewitching, joins a busy and interesting field. The threads of the true story on which Dawson’s book is based trace a depressingly familiar pattern. The Warboys witch trials in Huntingdonshire took place after allegations were made in 1589 by Jane, the nine-year-old daughter of local squire Robert Throckmorton, who had been having fits and trances. She accused 76-year-old wise woman Alice Samuel of bewitching her, and was supported by her four sisters and servants, who began displaying similar symptoms. Jane’s urine was sent away to a specialist doctor who upped the stakes by raising the prospect of sorcery. Matters then took a deadly turn: Robert was a friend of Sir Henry Cromwell, whose wife visited Alice and confronted her with the suspicions of her witchcraft. Alice subsequently haunted Lady Cromwell’s nightmares, and eventually Lady Cromwell fell ill and died. Although Alice, under pressure, confessed to bewitching the children, it was Lady Cromwell’s death that led to her being tried and hanged alongside her husband John and daughter Agnes. What new dimension does Dawson bring to this terrible tale? She focuses less on magic than on the inherent violent misogyny, underscored by an invented backstory in which Alice endures gang-rape by the “high-born men” later behind her doom. The novel evokes the language of the time through occasional period words and phrases without risking obscurity. Its complex plot involves a host of robustly drawn characters, with Alice herself and Robert’s servant Martha mainly providing our perspectives on the events. The viciously sexist environment is foregrounded throughout. The Bewitching is divided into five parts, like a Shakespearean tragedy, and there are Shakespearean echoes elsewhere. Alice certainly has a tragic weakness in her unbridled tongue, but she achieves genuinely heroic status by the end of the book. During her trial, she gradually realises that her fate has long been sealed, only incidentally because of her forthrightness. She thinks back to her rape – “the men who roughly handled her … who changed her life, who set this in motion” – gathers herself and then mockingly plays up to her accusers’ fears. She feels pride in her daughter Agnes’s defiance, too: these common women die strong, with their own nobility. Hares are a recurring motif in The Bewitching, natural enough features of the countryside, with supernatural associations for women. Dawson invokes their symbolism but, in keeping with her main theme, we are reminded that even their boxing is a form of sexual harassment. The book’s last section is a mystical epilogue, drawing on the Middle English poem The Names of the Hare for a vision of female solidarity. The Bewitching is not without flaws – the dialogue can occasionally be clunky – but it handles its material with panache, and has real slow-burning power and pace. [...] Read more...
The Bewitching – Sunday Times review
July 26, 2022Jill Dawson’s The Bewitching, with its compelling story and imaginative reconstruction of past beliefs, is set in lateElizabethan Huntingdonshire. A truculent old woman, Alice Samuel, arouses suspicions that she is responsible for sudden seizures experienced by the daughters of the local squire, Robert Throckmorton. The Throckmorton household itself, seen through the eyes of the narrator Martha, a servant-cum-governess, is an unhappy place, but Alice becomes the scapegoat for all the family’s troubles. Based on the real-life case of the witches of Warboys, Dawson’s novel highlights the swiftness with which a community can turn on one of its own. – The Sunday Times [...] Read more...
The Bewitching FT review
July 23, 2022A vivid retelling…From the first farcical accusation to the novel’s tragic denouement, the plot unfolds with the unrelenting pace of a psychological thriller. For the reader, Alice’s innocence is never in question, but the novel ably portrays the web of misogyny, fear and religious convictions that made her guilt seem credible at the time. A treacle-thick atmosphere of moral anxiety suffuses the novel…Dawson lets the descriptions of this intensely physical world evoke its equally intense psychological landscape. And from Rebecca Abrams… In the course of the witch hunts that engulfed Europe in the 16th and 17th century, more than 50,000 people lost their lives, the vast majority of whom were post-menopausal women. In Witch Craze (2004), her magisterial study of hundreds of German witch trials, historian Lyndal Roper insists: “We cannot understand why witches were hunted unless we take the fears of those who hunted witches seriously. We must enter the nightmare world of those who believed in witchcraft and of those who found themselves accused.” Author Jill Dawson takes on the challenge of such understanding with her latest novel, The Bewitching, a vivid retelling of the true story of Alice Samuel, who was accused and found guilty of bewitching the five young daughters of local squire Robert Throckmorton in the village of Warboys in Cambridgeshire at the end of the 16th century. Most of the novel’s narration is given to Martha, the Throckmortons’ faithful servant, who watches with mounting anxiety as the children fall prey to sudden unaccountable fits and visions. When one daughter after another names their neighbour Alice, a sharp-tongued misfit, as the source of their afflictions, the inescapable net of suspicion is cast. As rumours swirl around the servants’ quarters, lurid accounts of demonic possession leech into the nursery, further nourishing the children’s febrile imaginations. Before long a trio of theologians from Cambridge university has descended on the household, eager to apply the demonologist’s handbook, the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, 1486, by Heinrich Kramer), to real life. From the first farcical accusation to the novel’s tragic denouement, the plot unfolds with the unrelenting pace of a psychological thriller Martha is plagued by doubts about the cause of the children’s attacks but takes refuge in silence, keenly aware, as an unmarried woman in her thirties and of unknown parentage, that her position in the social order of Warboys is also precarious. “The life of a servant is one of hidden traps,” she reflects, “like the ones left in the woods for coneys.” A treacle-thick atmosphere of moral anxiety suffuses the novel. For the female characters, every passing thought and action must be policed for signs of “naughtiness”. When Bessie Throckmorton is gripped by menstrual cramps for the first time, she is convinced she’s possessed by demons. Even her own mother struggles to find words to explain to the terrified girl that what she’s experiencing is normal and natural. Hovering over the novel is the spectre of sexual predation from which no female is safe. For the men scrutinising the Throckmorton girls and closing in on poor Alice and her 19-year-old daughter Nessie, the “mysteries” of the female body are a constant source of prurient fascination and eroticised dread. Martha senses that her master’s “great terror” of Alice Samuel has nothing to do with imps or toads, but even once she has acknowledged her own suppressed memory of Robert Throckmorton as “someone lewd and incapable of restraint”, she shrinks from following this knowledge to its taboo conclusion. In a culture saturated with anxiety and secrecy about female sexuality and fertility, male power is paramount. Neither Martha, nor her mistress, nor the girls she has helped raise since infancy, and least of all Alice and Nessie Samuel, have any real agency; all are equally confined by their gender and the ways it is perceived. Within these constraints, the potent allure of being an accuser starts to make tragic sense. So too the near-impossibility of resisting the collective view of those accused. Even the idea of resistance is terrifying, as Martha, caught between knowing and not-knowing, admits to herself in a fleeting vision of velvet purses “gathered, puckered, with the stitches now unravelling, opening their mouths, and then all the wild, ungodly things, bats, moths, devils, words, flying out”. If the novel feels a little didactic in places, for the most part Dawson lets the descriptions of this intensely physical world evoke its equally intense psychological landscape. Folklore and herbal cures, brewing and baking, and the unceasing women’s work of caring for the young and the sick unite and disunite the community of Warboys. From a modern perspective, a perplexing feature of historic accounts of witchcraft trials is not so much why accused women confessed to their alleged crimes, but why they did so in such extravagant detail. Dawson does not shy away from this puzzle and her depiction of Alice Samuel’s trial, drawn from contemporary accounts, is as plausible as it is harrowing. The paranoia, envy, tribalism and misogyny that drove the atrocities of historic witch trials find expression today in online trolling, victim-shaming and virulent conspiracy theories. The last legal execution for witchcraft in Britain took place in 1727. Witch hunts, however, are with us still. ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
The Critic reviews The Bewitching
July 23, 2022If it’s voice as a narrative tool that you’re after, there aren’t many better contemporary practitioners than Jill Dawson. Over nine previous novels, although distinct and varied in subject, certain preferences have emerged in several of them: an historical setting; a protagonist drawn from reality; and a distinctive narrative voice that flavours the story while relating it. Fred & Edie(2000) and Lucky Bunny (2011) are particular favourites of mine, while Dawson has also shown (in 2006’s Watch Me Disappear) that she can ignore all the above preferences and still produce something exceptional: in that case, a bold study of childhood sexuality. Dawson’s new novel The Bewitching is her most historical yet, being set from 1589–91 in her usual stamping ground of Cambridgeshire. The subject matter is witchcraft and the suspicion of it, told to us by Martha, the deaf young maid of a household. She is one of Dawson’s more plain-spoken narrators, to be sure, but the language remains vivid (a bat is “like a bundle of knitted twigs in your hand”) and the characters full. The action and suspicion begins with a girl, Jane, suffering from fits, which Doctor Butler — an expert in “the ways in which women’s bodies and spirits affect their already weak chamber of wisdom” — assures them are not due to “frenzy of the womb”. Jane has an explanation of her own, but nobody is interested in that when there’s sorcery afoot, or at least someone local they can blame for it. That someone is Alice Samuel, a “low-bred, rude and loud” old woman who provides the perfect scapegoat. And the fingers may not be satisfied with pointing only at her. The general trend of the plot may not surprise (three of the sections of the novel are titled The Accusation, The Confession and The Trial) but Dawson keeps things interesting. Of course, a story about false suspicions, conspiracy theories and trial by gossip is not so much timely as timeless, and what we end up with is a superior example of solid literary fiction, that oft-derided genre. Dawson’s ability to maintain an interesting voice and tell a story at the same time is a lesson to any novelist. She shows that, contrary to Batuman’s belief, it doesn’t have to be either/or. ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
Suzy Feay reviews The Bewitching in The Spectator
July 23, 2022‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go up in flames rather than bodies. The mob mentality behind the phenomenon may not have changed as much as the medium or the mindset. In retelling a celebrated case from Elizabethan England, Jill Dawson enters thoroughly into her characters’ religious world view, while giving a meaningful glance at the issues of today. The fate of the Warboys witches – three members of one family – was recounted in prurient pamphlets of the time, but Dawson colours in the crude woodcut of history with passionate emotions and plausible motivations. As she sets the scene, we learn that the bells which had recently rung out in the Huntingdon village of Warboys to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada have reverted to regulating daily life in the tight-knit community. Sharp-tongued Alice Samuel is more respected than liked, married to a prominent man and mother of the beautiful Nessie. The five Throckmorton girls, who have now moved into the manor house with their parents, prove the family’s downfall. Alice, at 50, is a crone in their eyes, and soon, whether by malice or contagion, the girls are having fits, sneezing convulsively and throwing around wild accusations gleaned from reading lurid accounts of witchcraft. The sounds and stinks of the era are pungently evoked, with the action viewed mostly by the Throckmortons’ partially deaf maid, Martha. Entrusted with family secrets, she is also usefully invisible when necessary: ‘I stand up and simply soften myself into the wall, like ivy or a moth, to watch the scene unfolding.’ Martha was a foundling, brought up by a nun, and is still apt to pray to the Virgin Mary or find a forbidden Catholic blessing on her lips. Religious flux swirls behind the action, while the Throckmorton name brings risky memories of the plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots. When accusations hover, there is safety in a pile-on. Dawson brings out the characters’ genuine terror of the supernatural; even level-headed Martha starts to believe in a witch’s power. Stories of abuse by prominent men like Jeffrey Epstein emerged while Dawson was writing, and fed into the text. What if the girls’ hysteria signals a buried trauma bursting to get out and tragically misses its mark? And what more easy way to stifle an obstreperous woman’s accusations than to accuse her first? Dawson’s vivid retelling doesn’t leave us with any comforting notion that human nature has advanced much. ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
Ian Parker reviews The Bewitching
July 22, 2022The Bewitching takes us back to 16th century Cambridgeshire, exploring the true story of the Witches of Warboys. Largely told from the perspective of one of the servants in the home of the local squire, Martha – deaf in one ear, yet more observant than anyone around her – watches on with increasing confusion, sympathy and fear, as a playful accusation of witchcraft from a nine-year-old girl sets off events which will change the lives of two families. In this age of ‘cancel culture’ and conspiracy theories, the novel uses the tragic history of witch trials to explore how easily and quickly reputations can be shredded by mere gossip, and how those with power can use it to manipulate victims into believing their own complicity. Dawson’s deft style means the questions are always implied, never explicit, although it is impossible to miss the parallels to our own times. 8/10 Costa Blanca News ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
The Bewitching launch party
July 17, 2022The launch party for The Bewitching took place on a balmy July evening at Carmelite House. Jill Dawson welcomed many of her friends and colleagues to the event. Click on a thumbnail to enlarge photos. ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
Jill Dawson conjures up a striking image of life in Elizabethan East Anglia
July 6, 2022Jill Dawson’s novels are often set in the Fens, often based on true stories and often written with a clear feminist purpose. And yet, they’re also astonishingly varied. Her last book, The Language of Birds, for example, turned the nanny murdered by Lord Lucan in 1974 from a historical footnote into a warm and vivid human being (from the Fens). Now, in The Bewitching, another real-life case allows Dawson to plunge us deep into the strange, superstitious heart of East Anglia in Elizabethan times. The novel opens with Alice, a woman of 49 years, being summoned to the local manor house where the Throckmorton family’s nine-year-old daughter Jane is having mysterious fits. As the village healer, Alice is willing to help—but once she starts to, Jane denounces her as a witch who’d caused the fits in the first place. And from there, it’s pretty much downhill for poor Alice, whose other giveaway witchy characteristics include a strikingly pretty daughter and an unfortunate tendency to speak her mind, even to her social betters. “Another real-life case allows Dawson to plunge us deep into the strange, superstitious heart of East Anglia” Watching all this with a sharpness that would surprise the Throckmortons is their servant Martha, the narrator of much of the book. Martha doesn’t doubt the existence of witches—but in this case she does, somewhat nervously, wonder if everything is quite as it seems. And she is of course right to wonder. While the direct accusations of witchcraft come from Jane, and later her sisters, the supposed theological underpinning is supplied by a series of patriarchal men whose belief in female inferiority is absolute. Not that this rules out female desirability… Only very occasionally does Martha’s perspective feel suspiciously modern. The rest of the time, she conjures up a wholly convincing picture of what it was like to live in a society with little understanding of medicine, where the supernatural was seen as perfectly natural. There’s also a cracking page-turner of a plot in which the (non-supernatural) revelations keep coming. The result is one of those novels that thoroughly immerses you in a world that might now seem unimaginable—except that the author has imagined it so completely. ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
The Bewitching – Mail on Sunday Review
July 4, 2022‘The Bewitching – Based on an actual witchcraft trial in an English village in the 16th century, this finely crafted novel explores the contagiousness of malicious rumours. Poor, stroppy, beer-tippling Alice, demonised for being outspoken, is a timeless female archetype, rendered with great skill by Dawson. There is a grim inevitability about her fate, as her paranoid accusers circle her like sharks. It is a terrific piece of storytelling, immersed as it is in its period but rich in resonance for the Twitter generation.’ – Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
The Bewitching – Times review
July 4, 2022‘Alice Samuel is an old, occasionally cantankerous woman who looks uncomfortably witch-like. A new squire, Robert Throckmorton, has come to reside in her Fenland village with his brood of children, including the oddball Johanne and Jane, who suffers from fits. When Alice calls on the family, Jane is overcome, and the old woman is soon accused of witchcraft. This is 16th century England, and such accusation is taken all too seriously. The story is partly told from Alice’s perspective and her bewilderment and anger are palpable. The accusations are impossible to refute and the proofs cited against her are bizarre. The other narrator is Martha, a servant who has been with the Throckmorton family since her adolescent years. Martha’s determination to think well of the family is tested by the slow revelation of dark secrets: there is tension in the parents’ marriage and allegations of sexual abuse. Novels about witch-hunts are not rare beasts, but The Bewitching which is based on the true story of the witches of Warboys is a particularly fine example. Tension builds, events spiral out of control and it builds to a devastating finale.’ – Antonia Senior, The Times ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
The Bewitching – Daily Mail review
July 4, 2022‘Set in the richly atmospheric surrounds of the author’s fenland home, the acclaimed Dawson’s historical latest draws on actual events to close the distance between the witch hunts of 16th century and our own era of conspiracy theories, flagrant abuses of power, and MeToo. Our narrator is thirty-something Martha, loyal and long-term servant of the wealthy Throckmorton family, who is among those present when an accusation of witchcraft is made against local wise-woman Alice Samuel. But the Throckmorton household itself harbours dark secrets, and as events rapidly escalate, Martha finds herself agonisingly torn between sympathy for Alice’s plight and the desire to explain the ills that afflict the family’s children. Novels about witches – or alternatively, women scapegoated, silenced and shunned – have flourished in recent years, but Dawson’s is a cut above and cumulative in its emotional heft, being also an empathic examination of internalised misogyny and shame. And while its uncompromising dénouement feels inevitable, a coda flares with reclaimed agency and even joy.’ – Stephanie Cross, The Daily Mail. ORDER FROM AMAZON HERE ORDER FROM TOPPINGS HERE ORDER FROM FOYLES HERE ORDER FROM WATERSTONES HERE ORDER FROM BOOKSHOP.ORG.UK HERE ORDER FROM BLACKWELLS HERE [...] Read more...
Language of Birds paperback edition
April 16, 2020…now available from Sceptre. ‘Timely, devastating and superbly realised’ – Daily Mail ‘The narrative’s progress towards the terrifying evening in the dark basement kitchen has the ineluctable pull of tragic myth. We know what must come, but this knowledge never detracts from the memorable beauty and intelligence of the novel. By focusing on the victim, Dawson allows us to completely rethink the original story in a way that honours Sandra Rivett’s short life.’ –The Guardian. Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
LANGUAGE OF BIRDS – FINANCIAL TIMES review
May 3, 2019‘Sandra Rivett’s history has long been dismantled and dismissed by a press in thrall to the flashy Lucan lifestyle. Dawson’s insistence that she take prominence with this novel goes some way to achieving a balance, even as the aristocratic carelessness and coldness at the heart of the book prevails.’ – Catherine Taylor, Financial Times. Read the full review here (paywall) [...] Read more...
iNEWS review of LANGUAGE OF BIRDS
April 21, 2019‘In her highly engrossing new novel, Dawson gives powerful voice to someone silenced in history – the murdered nanny at the heart of the notorious case of Lord Lucan, who disappeared on the night of the murder.’ – iNews. Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
Guardian review – LANGUAGE OF BIRDS
April 21, 2019‘The narrative’s progress towards the terrifying evening in the dark basement kitchen has the ineluctable pull of tragic myth. We know what must come, but this knowledge never detracts from the memorable beauty and intelligence of the novel. By focusing on the victim, Dawson allows us to completely rethink the original story in a way that honours Sandra Rivett’s short life.’ Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
Spectator review of LANGUAGE OF BIRDS
April 17, 2019‘All in all, this beautifully written novel achieves its aim: it gives the victim back her voice.’ Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
Daily Telegraph review of LANGUAGE OF BIRDS
April 15, 2019**** ‘Lady Morven and Mandy are superbly drawn characters…this is a sensitive and often beautifully written novel…Dawson’s greatest achievement is to breathe life into Sandra, emphasising that she would deserve our attention even if she had not met such a tragic end.’ [...] Read more...
Glasgow Herald gives The Language Of Birds by Jill Dawson 9 out of 10
April 15, 2019JILL Dawson is an award-winning novelist and poet. The Language Of Birds is based on the story of Lord Lucan and is set in 1970s London. Mandy and Rosemary work as nannies for aristocratic families and the book explores the freedom enjoyed by the young women escaping small villages to enjoy the anonymity of the big city. Both Mandy and Rosemary have had mental health problems and Mandy is sympathetic to her boss Katharine, Lady Morven, who is struggling with depression, while Rosemary is more inclined to side with the charismatic Earl. Dawson brings Mandy’s warm, empathetic character fully to life, while Rosemary’s gullible, eager-to-please Norland nanny persona is intriguingly irritating. The story is of domestic details, family dramas, private detectives, country house holidays and occasional chilling atmospheres pointing towards tragedy, all brilliantly told. [...] Read more...
STYLIST review of LANGUAGE OF BIRDS
April 2, 2019‘Jill Dawson’s fictional take on the affair quietly but firmly redresses the balance as she makes her heroine, Mandy River, a warm, intelligent and life-filled delight who is not a victim but a woman who clear-sightedly sees a family beset by problems and Lord Morven for exactly who he is. Conjuring a world of class lines and monied entitlement all told by a friend of Mandy’s, this is a carefully and beautifully written book that’ll have you hooked.’ Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
RED online review of LANGUAGE OF BIRDS
March 31, 2019‘In The Language Of Birds, Jill Dawson weaves a heartbreaking story of a young woman arriving in London to start afresh and look after the children of Lord and Lady Morven but soon finds herself a pawn in a bitter custody battle.’ Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
LANGUAGE OF BIRDS Daily Mail review
March 31, 2019Read the Daily Mail‘s review of LANGUAGE OF BIRDS here. ‘…this book is in a class of its own.’ [...] Read more...
LANGUAGE OF BIRDS Observer Review
March 31, 2019Great review for LANGUAGE OF BIRDS in The Observer. ‘Mandy is a gorgeous creation, a character so warm and vivid you half wish you could take her out for a drink.’ Read the full review here. [...] Read more...
LANGUAGE OF BIRDS – The Bookseller book of the month
February 20, 2019The Bookseller – Book of the Month choice Alice O’Keeffe – 11 January ‘The latest from the immeasurably talented Jill Dawson … In Dawson’s sensitive yet gripping retelling of the story, the nanny takes centre stage rather than the aristocrat.’ [...] Read more...
How 12 months in a log cabin changed my life
February 12, 2018Fear, beauty, break-ups and big cats – how 12 months in a remote log cabin changed my life Daily Telegraph, February 10, 2018 photos: Jenny Riffle [...] Read more...
Jill Dawson runner-up in New Angle Prize
September 11, 2017Jill Dawson wins the runner-up in the New Angle Prize for her novel The Crime Writer, and wins £500. The judges enjoyed “a destabilising book in which you’re never quite sure what’s real, imagined, or simply the result of madness”. More details here. [...] Read more...
Prize for THE CRIME WRITER
November 7, 2016The Crime Writer won both the novel section of the East Anglian Book Awards and overall Book of the Year More details here. [...] Read more...
Writing tips
August 31, 2016Jill Dawson shares tips for writing students and gives an intimate account of her own writing path, here. [...] Read more...
THE CRIME WRITER – New Zealand Book Review
July 25, 2016‘The Crime Writer, then, works as its own double agent, in a fond nod to Highsmith’s partiality to the identity switch. One reading finds a straightforward suspense story stacked with deliciously unlikeable people and rife with period detail; another offers a fascinating fictive stroll into the mind of a writer who veers off the path of invention on to one of action. After all, as Pat muses, murder isn’t always murder. “Sometimes we dress people up in certain clothes and outfits, soldiers, executioners, abortionists, and say: It’s OK for you to take a life. ‘A novel with the perspicacity of the work that inspired it, The Crime Writer is an homage wholly deserving of a credit all its own.’ – Stephanie Jones New Zealand book review [...] Read more...
Sarah Waters recommends THE CRIME WRITER
July 11, 2016‘Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer has Patricia Highsmith as its heroine: it’s inspired by the years that the thriller writer spent in Suffolk in the early 1960s, and is fantastically moody and appealingly unhinged – a piece of sophisticated literary ventriloquism that achieves a wonderful blurring of the lines between fact and fantasy.’ [...] Read more...
THE CRIME WRITER review from a friend of Patricia Highsmith
July 7, 2016MAIL ONLINE Rating: ***** When writers die, their popularity often dies with them. Does anyone read John Fowles or Anthony Burgess or Norman Mailer any more? In the case of their contemporary Patricia Highsmith, the reverse is true. When she died in 1995, she didn’t even have an American publisher. But 21 years on, she is more popular than she ever was when alive. Two biographies have appeared, both extremely good. Her dark, driven novels are all in print, and four of them – The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol, The Two Faces Of January and The Blunderer – have been turned into films. Patricia Highsmith never believed in taking things lying down. In her novels, her sympathy was for the murderers, not their victims Her reputation has grown, too. While she was alive, she was often pigeonholed in the Crime genre, the stuffier critics and academics unable to deal with writing that was quite so compulsively, insanely readable. But not any more: these days, the ghost of Patricia Highsmith haunts our world, like a beady owl crouching on a rooftop, its blood-stained claws at the ready. Jill Dawson has now had the audacity to push things a stage further. Her new novel, The Crime Writer, is written in the style of Patricia Highsmith and features Patricia Highsmith as its main character. Not only that, but the fictional Patricia Highsmith also commits murder. What would the real Patricia Highsmith have thought of this? Having known her a little, I can be pretty sure she would be bristling with fury. I suspect Jill Dawson knows this too. Her Patricia Highsmith character rants against this sort of intrusion. ‘Nosy little bitches, biographers, vultures all of them, trying to work their way into your secret heart, winkle out the darkness and deceit, take your life… and make it their own.’ Highsmith never believed in taking things lying down. In her novels, her sympathy was for the murderers, not their victims. She called them ‘my psychopath-heroes’. I once pointed out to her that Vic, her psychopath hero of Deep Water, is quite weak until he begins to murder his wife’s lovers. She immediately sprang to Vic’s defence. ‘He’s not weak,’ she replied. ‘He’s mentally a bit odd, but at least he has a go. To impress on his wife that he’s not taking any more he eliminates those boring lovers. At least he HAS A GO. At least he TRIES.’ Jill Dawson has chosen to portray Patricia Highsmith in 1964, when she was 43 years old, an American in England, living alone in a cottage in Suffolk. During that period, she was working on A Suspension Of Mercy, a novel about an American crime writer in Suffolk who is suspected of murder. So The Crime Writer is a novel about a novelist who is writing a novel about a novelist who is thinking of writing a novel about a man who is plotting to murder his wife. In clumsier hands, this might have emerged as impossibly convoluted and tricksy, but Dawson somehow manages to keep it all very simple. Her novel is, in fact, every bit as gripping as… well, as a novel by Patricia Highsmith. The real Patricia Highsmith admitted to being confused between real life and fiction. ‘He is a writer who gets life a little mixed up with his plots,’ she wrote to a friend about the hero of A Suspension Of Mercy. ‘Something that may happen to me. I think I have some schizoid tendencies, which must Be Watched.’ Dawson takes this idea a step further, and has her fictional Highsmith bludgeoning to death the boorish husband of the woman with whom she is in love. I remember once asking her if she would ever commit a murder. She told me she abhorred the idea of revenge. But then she added, almost as an afterthought: ‘Mind you, the people I really detest seem to come to bad ends anyway. Car crashes, that sort of thing.’ On another occasion, she told me she had twice dreamed of murder. ‘In one of the dreams, it was a certain person whom I know, an older woman whom I specially dislike; she’s an American but I dislike her because she’s crooked. But the idea that you’ve done it! It’s the most dreadful feeling to me!’ Her overriding theme as a novelist was in fact not murder, but the effect of guilt on the mind of the murderer. It seems likely that throughout her life she sublimated her almost overwhelming instinct to do away with her paranoid, bossy, bullying mother, who used to boast that she had tried to have her aborted. Her mother puts in an appearance in The Crime Writer, turning on Patricia and attacking her with a coat hanger, just as she did in real life. She once wrote accusingly to her daughter: ‘I believe you would gladly put me in Dachau if it were possible without a minute’s thought.’ Anyone with a mother like that is surely destined to become a murderer, or a novelist, or both. The Crime Writer sticks as close to real life as possible: Highsmith really was obsessively in love with a married woman at that time, and she really did love snails, housing 300 snails in her back garden, and sometimes carrying 100 snails in her handbag, along with a big head of lettuce for them to nibble on. She even used to smuggle them into this country from France, ten under each breast, but perhaps Jill Dawson thought this little detail too outlandish to be credible as fiction. Dawson reproduces life in Suffolk in the Sixties with amazing skill. I wonder what the great Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield, the classic work about English rural life, thinks about popping up as a character? In her acknowledgements at the end, Dawson thanks him ‘for his kindness and generosity’, two characteristics that certainly come across in her portrayal, but it still must be very odd for him in his 90s to read of himself as a young man indulging in an unconsummated bedtime roll with Highsmith (‘I plunge, daringly, with my naughty, wilful, transgressive hand. But there’s no desire for me there: just softness, Ronnie’s sweet kindness, his tender pity for me.’). At moments like this, Patricia Highsmith sounds to me more sentimental than ever she was in real life (she once described falling in love as ‘like being shot in the face’), but I may be wrong. For the most part, The Crime Writer represents an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, easily on a par with The Master, Colm Tóibín’s fine novel about Henry James. Highsmith’s writing style was tight and matter-of-fact and in-your-face, like a clenched fist. It was also very physical, with a powerful undertow of disgust, which Dawson catches uncannily well. ‘Pat clomped home and threw a splat of steak onto the lit fire in the front room, watching it melt into a fat black lump, stinking out the place with its acrid greasy smoke.’ Of the rain outside, she describes ‘the sound of it sizzling, like fat bubbling in a pan’. In Highsmith’s mind, a pushy young acolyte, to whom she is both attracted and repelled, has ‘breasts like performing monkeys, out to catch the eye’. Jill Dawson begins a note at the end of the book by saying: ‘I have long been addicted to Patricia Highsmith’s fiction and I hope that fellow fans will enjoy spotting the many references to her novels and short stories… as well as some real events from her life.’ Well, it certainly worked for me. I haven’t enjoyed a novel so much in a very long time. But then, it might almost have been written with me in mind. I have read all her books, and once proposed writing a critical analysis of her work (she declined my offer). My own house even backs on to the street where she once lived, and the corpse in The Crime Writer drifts in the North Sea past my front window. Would this novel be as exciting for someone coming new to Patricia Highsmith, someone unable to catch all the references? Perhaps not quite, but they would, I suspect, still be swept along by a very exciting plot, its playfulness, its instinctive feel for atmosphere, and its exhilarating and very Highsmithian sense of creeping claustrophobia. And who could possibly resist the tantalising character of Patricia Highsmith herself, by turns bullish and anxious, victim and predator, grasping owl and wriggling mouse? [...] Read more...
Book of the Week – The Lady
June 26, 2016The title of Orange Prize-shortlisted Jill Dawson’s novel (The Crime Writer) should be taken with a pinch of salt: its subject, Patricia Highsmith, considered herself to be a writer not of crime but suspense fiction: less Agatha Christie, more Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Highsmith’s 1960s sojourn in the quiet Suffolk village of Earl Soham provides the inspiration for Dawson’s own tale of suspense, an unlikely rural interlude during which the Texan-born Highsmith struck up a perhaps even more unlikely friendship with Ronald Blythe, author of the classic Akenfield. Blythe’s is a steadying presence and, for that reason, a welcome one, since when we meet ‘Pat’ she is embroiled in a tormented affair with a married woman. Worse is to come – a late-night confrontation leads to a devastating act of violence. This is on one level an assured and visceral page-turner, as convincing as it is bold. But it also offers arresting insights into the craft of fiction itself, and raises provocative questions about the boundary between life and art. Creativity, madness and obsessive love overlap throughout, and the line between fantasy and reality blurs. But while we are drawn into the murk of Highsmith’s childhood, Dawson is far too intelligent a writer to succumb to ‘Freudian voodoo’ in an attempt to entirely explain away the dark genius of her compelling central character. – Stephanie Cross [...] Read more...
Telegraph review of THE CRIME WRITER
June 17, 2016Jake Kerridge enjoys a novel that imagines Patricia Highsmith had dabbled in crime herself Patricia Highsmith died more than 20 years ago, but Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer is, surprisingly, the first novel to take as its subject that rebarbative, whisky-soaked genius, who liked to take her pet snails to parties in her handbag and could seduce beautiful women as effortlessly as Warren Beatty. Perhaps novelists have so far been daunted by the task of rendering Highsmith plausible – she seems to belong in a book even more lurid and unlikely than the ones she wrote herself. Dawson, though, is an old hand at writing fiction about real people (The Great Lover, her novel about Rupert Brooke, is particularly good) and here she pulls it off again with confidence and brio. There has been a recent spate of cannibalistic crime novels that have imagined real-life crime writers, from Agatha Christie to Josephine Tey, turning detectives. For Highsmith, though, this won’t do. She was interested in the psychology of criminals, and detectives are only peripheral figures in her novels. It is thus cheeky but apt that Dawson has Highsmith commit, rather than investigate, a crime. The novel begins in 1963, with the 42-year-old Texan holed up in a cottage in Suffolk, where she hopes to avoid a sinister stalker. Here, she spends hours pining for her lover, a married Englishwoman who seems, despite their new proximity, emotionally further away than ever. In her daily writing, Highsmith takes violent revenge on her enemies; soon, fogged by booze and heartbreak, she struggles to separate her fiction from real life. Several scenes recall moments from Highsmith’s novels, but The Crime Writer is more than the sum of its pastiche parts. Dawson has drawn a witty, creepy plot as well as a convincing character sketch of a woman all too easy to caricature. The intensely private Highsmith – who would have disapproved of any book in proportion to how accurately it portrayed her inner life – would have loathed this one. [...] Read more...
Guardian Review of The Crime Writer
June 11, 2016Dawson can be applauded for her passionate immersion in her subject, and for creating a novel as dark and odd as the subject herself. In an era that favours dark suspense and unhealthy passions, a novel about Patricia Highsmith could hardly be more timely. Published a few months after the release of the acclaimed Highsmith adaptation Carol, Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer explores the life and work of an author whose themes emerged a good half century ahead of the current taste for domestic noir or the psychological thriller. Highsmith is both rated and periodically neglected: sidelined as a crime novelist, she has never quite been awarded the lofty place in the canon she deserves, though Graham Greene labelled her “the poet of apprehension”. As well as 22 novels, she produced exquisite short stories, many written at a very young age. She had a strange and interesting life, meticulously portrayed in Andrew Wilson’s biography Beautiful Shadow and then again in Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith. Her “little hell” of an American childhood was followed by a peripatetic existence in Europe, literary success that resulted in several film adaptations – most notably Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley – and a highly complex personal life. She seduced a string of women, bred snails, suffered from severe depression, became an emotionally avoidant alcoholic and was variously viewed as kind, witty, and a nightmare. As one of her publishers, Otto Penzler, said she was “mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving … But her books? Brilliant.” Hers was a dark and thrilling talent, her philosophy and the murky psychology of her protagonists owing more to Dostoevsky or Kafkathan to detective fiction. Her explorations of criminal mentality, obsessive love, stalking and murder reveal a fascinating mind. In 1964, Highsmith retreated to deepest Suffolk, taking on a house in the village of Earl Soham, and this is where Dawson has landed for the focus of what is a clever idea. The Crime Writer merges the life and the literary themes of Patricia Highsmith and plays with them, creating a layering of forms, a novel within a novel in which Highsmith is both subject and protagonist. Dawson asks what would happen if that perverse mind had enacted her fantasies. As Wilson notes, many of Highsmith’s criminal heroes “have imaginations that enable them to … live out the fiction inside their heads.” The village is finely portrayed as claustrophobic, brooding, yet suitably prosaic, with a more evolved setting than Highsmith’s own Suffolk novel, A Suspension of Mercy. Dawson’s depiction of time and place is remarkably well handled, and she achieves the double act of capturing a 1960s village with a native’s authenticity and with the slight distortion, the prejudice and saturated colour, of an American abroad. Here Pat, as she is known, is in hiding from fame and fans, and is fixated on a female lover, a mild tribute to the love object in Carol. This London-dwelling mistress is in a destructive marriage, and Pat’s anger towards her love rival reaches boiling point as fantasy turns to violence. A young female journalist, Virginia, is on the prowl, while Pat spends much time drinking, longing for her girlfriend, tending snails and ruminating with her friend Ronnie. “Violence is not an act, it’s a feeling,” Pat tells Virginia. And if this boisterous hack is always leaping out of the bushes, just what has she witnessed that she shouldn’t have, and what are her intentions towards Pat? The novel is so busy successfully inhabiting its subject’s psyche, surroundings and fictional process, that there is little room for the plotting at which Highsmith herself so excelled. It’s a slow burn of ventriloquism, rumination and atmosphere, full of knowledge and little nods that will delight Highsmith fans; Dawson, like Virginia, is “releasing her scraps of information in drips”. Once the plot really gets going, at a frustratingly late stage, its surprises are a relief. The way to read this novel is not to expect a conventional plot. Dawson has previously written about Rupert Brooke and the murderess Edith Thompson, and her eighth novel is a similarly strange hybrid of fact and fiction. This is an ingenious concept, one that would be almost impossible to pull off without some sagging, and momentum suffers while observation reigns. Dawson can be applauded for her passionate immersion in her subject, and for creating a novel as dark and odd as the subject herself. [...] Read more...
The Crime Writer – online reaction
June 6, 2016I was initially aware of Patricia Highsmith, as most non-fans probably are, as the author of The Talented Mr Ripley – and that only because I’d seen the film, not read the book. Then a couple of years ago I read Deep Water for an online book club and was instantly hooked…and astounded. How had I not realised what a good writer she was? Since then two more high-profile film adaptations have been released – The Two Faces of January and Carol – and Highsmith has been made, quite rightly, a Virago Modern Classic. The more I read her books the more I wondered about the woman herself, as I often do about crime writers actually. What kind of person – what kind of woman? – could come up with these gruesome scenarios and could explore death and murder in almost celebratory detail? Usually, as I discovered when I attended Spring Thrills at the Rooftop Book Club recently, the writers behind the fantastically popular modern crime genre are perfectly normal – and often funny, feisty and fascinating. The kind of people you’d enjoy going out to dinner with. Not quite so Patricia Highsmith. Having decided to take the plunge and read Andrew Wilson’s hefty biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith I soon discovered that she was possibly the most socially awkward and eccentric writer I’d ever read about and someone you might not feel entirely comfortable sitting next to at a restaurant, particularly with her handbag full of snails. Nevertheless I began to find her outlandish behaviour and unconventional life oddly compelling. Despite the occasionally dry tone of Wilson’s opus (he provides a lot of social context, which is sometimes interesting and relevant and…sometimes not) I persevered, albeit slowly. About half way through I found my motivation – The Crime Writer by Jill Dawson was coming out and I was offered a proof copy. Is it right or even fair to say I knew it would be good before I’d read a single page? Perhaps not but I think most bookworms know ‘the feeling’ you get when it comes to certain books. Jill Dawson is the successful author of nine novels and has been shortlisted for the Whitbread and Orange Prizes. I’m not sure where the particular inspiration for The Crime Writer came from, although in the acknowledgements she does say she has ‘long been addicted to Patricia Highsmith’s fiction’ and her website tells me she ‘is renowned for her novels revisiting known stories and famous figures’, but mere pages in it is quite clear she is a huge fan and that this book is a very sincere tribute. The Crime Writer is a fictionalised account of a short period of time in Highsmith’s life that she spent in Suffolk. She was already well-known at this point and was often fearful of being found by fans and journalists. Her increasing paranoia amply accommodates the crime caper that follows and there are many moments of near-farcical humour as she attempts to remain elusive. This American wasn’t, however, the type to blend in anywhere, let alone the genteel English countryside of the 1960s. As Highsmith hides, writes and tends to her snails she becomes increasingly highly-strung as she pursues married lover Sam while being pursued herself by attractive young journalist Ginny. It falls to local and fellow writer Ronnie to calm her down and tame her excesses – but in his absence her grip on reality falters, to fatal effect. Funny, horrific and moving in turn this is a riveting read and an intriguing glimpse into the murky depths of an extraordinary writer. Jill Dawson captures Highsmith’s eccentricities brilliantly, while somehow also managing to convey her humanity. By seamlessly blending fact and fiction alongside the tender as well as grotesque sides of her personality Dawson has coaxed the eternally reluctant Highsmith out of the shadows and made her relatable – a skill that Highsmith herself excelled at in her own fiction. I was endlessly impressed by the attention to detail, particularly having come to this straight from Wilson’s biography. Fans of Highsmith will also love spotting the echoes of her fiction weaved in and throughout the narrative – but don’t be put off if you haven’t read any of her work. This is the perfect springboard from which to discover this unique writer if you haven’t already and I myself am pleased to have discovered Jill Dawson. – Mel Mitchell, nudge-book.com [...] Read more...
Sunday Express review of The Crime Writer
June 6, 2016Pat is a haunted woman. “Something pursued her. Dreams – phantoms – woke her in the small hours, driving her from her bed to walk in the darkness of the strange English village.” Sequestered in Earl Soham, drinking too much whisky and brooding over her relationship with cool, elegant but married Sam, Pat is starting to feel paranoid, restless and full of uncontainable impulses. The Pat in question is a fictionalised version of Patricia Highsmith, the US novelist who loathed the term “crime writer”, as Jill’s impeccable portrait reveals. And her life is starting to get as murderously tricky as a storyline in one of her own books. It’s a neat narrative device to plunge a psychological plotter into a problem largely of her own making. As well as the impossible love affair, there is a murder, menacing anonymous letters and the disturbing incursion of childhood memories (“that low, grim hum of constant quarrelling”) as she struggles to escape the hectoring recollections of her abusive stepfather and her fraught relationship with her mother. As Pat is overtaken by events, a breakdown looms. Jill Dawson’s clear, crisp prose provides a stark contrast to the maddening inner workings of Pat’s increasingly troubled mind. “It’s not controlled, plotted, planned and deliberate: it’s all just an explosion of mess, of feeling. Feelings directing everything.” In a rather intriguing subplot, Pat is being courted by the perky Virginia Smythson-Balby whose distant cousin is writing an unauthorised biography of her and that brings back memories of present amours, past loves and old break-ups. It’s a volatile mixture and unsurprisingly, Pat eventually succumbs to the pressure. If The Crime Writer has a flaw, it’s the faltering nature of the ending, but overall it is a hugely compelling read, jam-packed full of tensions and psychological insight, all beautifully observed. VERDICT 4/5 Eithne Farry [...] Read more...
The Crime Writer – The Literary Review’s verdict
June 6, 2016Having myself published a novel called The Mystery Writer, I felt a frisson of fellowship on receiving The Crime Writer, the more so on realising that Dawson’s book, like mine, mixes historical fact with fiction. The main character in Dawson’s book is based on the notoriously gay, notoriously sinister crime writer Patricia Highsmith. The action takes place in the mid-1960s, when Highsmith was living in a cottage in East Soham in Suffolk and writing her novel A Suspension of Mercy. A pushy young woman inveigles herself into Pat’s life, initially in the guise of a journalist. She probes away at Pat’s privacy, with Pat feebly protesting: ‘Leave the novels alone – the unconscious bits should remain unconscious.’ But Pat also has a conscious secret to guard. She has crossed the line that very few people cross, turning imagined deeds into reality. You do not need to be a passionate Highsmith fan to admire this beautifully written and elegant novel, but I think it will particularly appeal to those who have read her books and know something about her life; they should recognise many of the allusions and ideas. – Jessica Mann [...] Read more...
The Crime Writer – Spectator review
May 28, 2016Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially increased by film versions of her Ripley novels and, most recently, Carol (an adaptation of The Price of Salt, her extraordinarily bold novel of a lesbian love affair). For all that, she is generally classed as a crime writer, albeit a very superior one. As one contemporary reviewer commented, ‘Patricia Highsmith is often called a mystery or crime writer, which is a bit like calling Picasso a draftsman.’ Now Jill Dawson has turned her into the central character of a novel. Ventriloquy is Dawson’s forte — earlier novels have channelled the voices of Rupert Brooke, the Wild Boy of Aveyron and Edith Thompson, executed for murder in 1923. Her novels revel in the way the past infiltrates the present. The Crime Writer is set in 1964, when Highsmith rented a cottage in a Suffolk village. Her stay there gave her the setting she used in A Suspension of Mercy, a strange novel (even by her standards) in which the boundaries between the real and imagined are shadowy and ill-defined. The same could be said of The Crime Writer. Highsmith is pursuing a secret love affair with Sam, a married woman she met in London. She is working hard and drinking heavily. The past lies heavily on her — particularly her traumatic experiences as a child with her parents and her step-father. The only bright spot in her emotional life seems to be her friendship with her neighbour, the young Ronald Blythe, who is gathering material he later published in Akenfield. Highsmith grows increasingly convinced that someone is pursuing her, a sensation that steadily worsens when Ginny Smythson-Balby, a pushy journalist with disturbingly prominent breasts, forces herself into Highsmith’s life. Bunnikins, her neighbour’s pet rabbit, is found decapitated in the garden. Then, when Sam comes to stay, the situation explodes into murder. Dawson charts with loving attention the slowly unfurling consequences, both practical and emotional, of the crime. The narrative is in Highsmith’s voice throughout; at the start and end, it is in the third person, but the lengthy middle section is in the first person; the reasons for this become apparent towards the end of the book. Highsmith’s many readers will enjoy how Dawson weaves in references to the novels and stories. True, the historical context is sometimes indicated a little too crudely to be wholly convincing. (And it is a rare pipe smoker who fills his pipe with Golden Virginia cigarette tobacco.) But, taken as a whole, this fascinating, skilfully constructed novel builds a convincing picture of Patricia Highsmith, her spiky, awkward intelligence and (in a phrase of her biographer, Joan Schenkar) ‘the low, flat, compellingly psychotic murmur’ of both her life and her prose. [...] Read more...
The Crime Writer – Daily Mail review
May 28, 2016Dawson often draws on real people for inspiration in her novels, and this one is no exception. Here, she takes the fascinating character of the legendary crime novelist Patricia Highsmith as both a subject for biographical scrutiny and the protagonist of an imagined story, in which Highsmith crosses the line between writing about murderers and becoming one herself. The setting is rural Suffolk in 1964. Highsmith is hiding out, furiously writing and conducting both a secretive affair with a married woman in London (similar to the eponymous Carol, of the film based on her book The Price Of Salt) and a tender friendship with Ronald Blythe, the author of Akenfield. So far, so true. But Dawson’s Pat is also obsessed with what it would be like to actually kill someone, and she has someone particular in mind. A beautifully crafted and utterly riveting blend of fact and fiction about a fascinating 20th-century figure. [...] Read more...
TELL-TALE HEART nominated for Folio Prize
January 16, 2015Jill Dawson’s latest novel The Tell-tale Heart has been included as one of the 80 books nominated for the Folio Prize for works of fiction published in 2014. The award is judged by 235 writers and critics who select the best novels of the year. The Folio Prize Academy’s role in selecting these 80 books is integral to the prize’s innovative peer review process. As an international body of writers and critics immersed in the world of books, the Academy is uniquely positioned to identify the most outstanding writing of our time. Chair of judges William Fiennes comments: “The list of nominations for this year’s Folio Prize is both daunting and exhilarating. It’s not just that the list has such range and richness. Reading the books, it’s as if we’re eavesdropping on a marvellous conversation about what a novel might be.” Click here to read the full list of nominations. [...] Read more...
Tell Tale Heart Spectator Book of the Year
November 19, 2014 The Tell-Tale Heart is a Spectator Book of the Year, chosen by Sofka Zinovieff. ‘I’ve loved all Jill Dawson’s novels (especially Wild Boy) and The Tell-Tale Heart is another example of her powerful yet delicate, intelligent, haunting writing.’ [...] Read more...
Tales from the Reading Room – review of Tell-Tale Heart
April 23, 2014It just so happened that both Annabel and I had copies of Jill Dawson’s new novel, The Tell-Tale Heart, and by swiftness of reading and writing, Annabel’s was the review that made it into Shiny New Books. I’ve been saving up mine for the blog, though, as we both agreed it was one of the best books we read in the run-up to the magazine launch, and that Jill Dawson is an author who doesn’t get as much recognition as she deserves. The Tell-Tale Heart is essentially the story of Patrick Robson, a 50-year-old professor of American Studies, ‘with one ex-wife and one ex-mistress and one daughter and one son I hardly ever see and one crappy job I no longer want and a case hanging over me and, God knows, nothing much to show for myself.’ He’s also been suffering from an advanced case of cardiomyopathy and given only six months to live. The story begins as he regains consciousness in his bed at Papworth Hospital outside Cambridge, only the third patient to have undergone the revolutionary ‘beating heart’ surgery in which the heart is kept artificially pumping as opposed to preserved in ice, a technique designed to improve the chance of a successful transplant. Marooned in his bed for the lengthy process of recovery, Patrick has plenty of time to reflect on his past, and to consider the changes he feels strangely compelled to make to his newly extended future. In this he is ambivalently aided by Maureen, his somewhat scatty but well-meaning transplant co-ordinator. Maureen is pushing him to write to the donor family, and horrifying him with the example letter she shows him, that Patrick considers full of saccharine ‘Hallmark’ sentiment. As he begins to compose a draft in his mind, however, the best he can come up with is: ‘Dear Donor Family. I am finding it very difficult to know what to say to you. A terrible truth: your good son’s heart is probably wasted on a man like me.’ It’s certainly the case that in his thoughtless womanising, his selfish pursuit of lust with no concern for the havoc he wreaked, as well as in his advanced illness, Patrick’s old heart has been every possible kind of unhealthy. But in his post-operative state, he begins to find the stirrings of entirely new feelings, a surprising perspective opens up to him on his ex-wife and daughter, a tenderness for their loyalty. He also feels himself growing fonder of Maureen, though whether this is a resurgence of his old tail-chasing ways or of a new fledgling relationship he cannot tell. He’s also surprisingly thrilled at the thought of giving up his job (he’s already under a cloud because of a pending sexual harrassment charge) and trying something different. Maureen is keen to read these changes in the light of cellular memory, the transplant of not just the heart, but the characteristics and tendencies of its previous owner, something Patrick dismisses with scorn. But then after a local newpaper article reveals too much about his donor, Patrick finds himself thinking more and more about the boy, Drew Beamish, whose motorbike crash led to his chance at a second life. The narrative opens up to a second strand, which we might describe as tracing the blood line of Patrick’s new heart through Drew Beamish’s ancestors. The time is 1816, on the eve of the Littleport riots, provoked by the awful disparity between the poor folk of the Fens and the few wealthy landowners. Willie Beamiss is a young lad who is ‘in the suds about Politics’ with a father who ‘had a talent for whipping up others, and when labour is back-breaking and stomachs growl empty you can rile the sleepiest and loyalist of farm labourers to sedition.’ Willie’s life is subject to two great forces – the growing insurrection of his folk and a newfound passion for local beauty, Susie Spencer. As their love develops and unfurls, so the harsher, darker passions of the labourers rise up in company with it, and after a night of violence and looting, Willie finds himself thrust in jail along with nineteen others, his father among them, all fearing for their lives. The beauty of The Tell-Tale Heart is that nothing is thrust upon the reader. We might interpret the passionate history of the Beamish’s – with its resting point in young Drew’s doomed infatuation for his school teacher – as a good match for Patrick. The refusal to blindly submit to the rules becomes a point of similarity, but whereas Patrick has coupled his with laziness and indifference to the feelings of others, the Beamish heart has loved openly and fiercely, seeking justice, self-advancement, love for its own sake. Patrick remains dismissive of ghostly echoes, but is compelled to seek out his donor’s mother, and be warned, the scene between them will break your heart, unless it’s made of stone. It’s a tribute to the easy flexibility of Jill Dawson’s narrative, that the novel can encompass both comedy and tragedy, the 19th century and the present day, and technology so futuristic that it brings with it a trace of ancient superstition. The uncanny properties of the human heart tie everything together in a story that beats with the enduring power of love in many forms. Just wonderful. [...] Read more...
Jill Dawson wins Harper’s Bazaar short story prize
April 2, 2014A panel of judges including Bloomsbury’s editorial director for fiction Helen Garnons-Williams, Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency,the author Polly Samson and Bazaar’s columnist Sam Baker voted unanimously to award joint first prize in the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition to Fatima Bhutto and Jill Dawson. Dawson’s story can be read in the May edition of Haper’s Bazaar. This year’s prizes have been split, leaving Bhutto to select a first edition from Asprey’s rare-book collection, and Dawson to holiday on the Scottish island of Eilean Shona, where JM Barrie penned the screenplay to Peter Pan. Congratulations to them both. Read Jill Dawson’s winning short story here. [...] Read more...
A blogger’s view of THE TELL-TALE HEART
March 6, 2014‘Patrick, at first an unsympathetic character, becomes easier in his skin, denying all personality changes to his surgeon while demonstrating the opposite in his actions – but then who wouldn’t after such an extraordinary experience. Dawson has Maureen, his transplant co-ordinator, rehearse the theories of cellular memory, then steps quietly aside as Patrick speculates about the new feelings he seems to be experiencing and his urge to learn more about Drew. Drew’s story is poignantly told but there’s no over-sentimentalising. It’s a work of extraordinary skill and subtlety. A few weeks ago I mentioned how little attention Helen Dunmore received in comparison to Barnes, McEwan, Amis et al, rarely unmentioned in the broadsheet reviews pages in one way or another. Jill Dawson falls into the same bracket, for me – accomplished, richly imaginative, quietly getting on with it, and thoroughly deserving of a prize or two. Maybe this will be her year.’ Susan Osborn blogger, A Life in Books [...] Read more...
Guardian review of THE TELL-TALE HEART
March 1, 2014The Fens don’t receive much fictional attention, perhaps due to an assumption that a landscape so lacking in dramatic topography must have no interesting stories to tell. As one apologetic inhabitant of the Cambridgeshire countryside admits in Jill Dawson’s novel: “The Fens. Most people find them – boring. Most people think they’re a bit flat.” Yet there is no finer advocate of Fenland than Dawson, who memorably evoked the randomness of the landscape in her 2006 novel Watch Me Disappear as “God’s snooker table … the sense that the buildings were just rolled out like balls until they came to a halt.” And though her novels are mostly set in the present, they are infused with archaic, ancestral memories of a more primitive age: a semi-submerged world of eerie marshes inhabited by stilt-walking Slodgers and Fen Tigers, the 17th-century saboteurs opposed to the Dutch engineers who came to drain their land. At first the protagonist of her new novel, a 50-year-old London-based university lecturer named Patrick, shares the popular view of Cambridgeshire as “utilitarian and unlovely”. Then again, he has no great desire to be there, as he is recovering in Papworth hospital having undergone a pioneering form of surgery known as a “beating heart” transplant (in which the organ is artificially stimulated prior to the operation rather than suspended in ice). Dawson depicts the invasiveness of heart surgery with arresting clarity: “I have a sudden image of myself in the operating theatre, my chest sprung open like a birdcage with the door wide and the bird flown. Robbed.” And though the guidelines published by the British Heart Foundation assure patients that the procedure amounts to nothing more than the installation of a new pump, even a rationalist such as Patrick cannot banish intimations that the alien organ was once the seat of someone else’s emotions. The phenomenon known as cellular memory gained attention through the 1997 memoir A Change of Heart, in which transplant recipient Claire Sylvia reported an uncharacteristic craving for beer and chicken nuggets which she discovered to have been the staple diet of her donor. The theory is dismissed by Patrick’s surgeon, but indiscreetly supported by the transplant coordinator, a talkative, well-meaning woman named Maureen, who strikes Patrick as resembling “a leprechaun … with Yorkshire terrier hair”. Protocols exist to prevent transplant patients discovering the identity of their donors. But an over-revealing local newspaper article leads Patrick towards Littleport, a small town near Ely, in which five citizens were hanged in 1816 for inciting a riot. The narrative then jumps backwards jarringly to the period of Napoleonic unrest, and is taken up by a young labourer, Willie Beamiss, who is illicitly in love with a local landowner’s daughter, and becomes a principal agitator in the violent protest against the high price of bread. Willie’s story is further interleaved with that of a modern descendant, Andrew Beamish, a troubled 15-year-old who has been excluded from school after entering into a sexual relationship with a young woman teacher. These interpolated sections are inserted at an oblique angle to the main thrust of Patrick’s own chaotic life; his divorce, his culpability in a sexual harassment case and growing fondness for Maureen. Yet the primary characters are connected by a sense of conviction. The rioter Willie has cause to consider his political motivation: “Where do feelings live? Inside us, surely, in our hearts.” Schoolboy Andrew addresses his teacher’s breach of trust by asking “Where do you think feelings are? Are they, like, inside you? Or do they sort of get inside you from someone or somewhere else?” Dawson makes an audacious attempt to link two centuries of history via an organ donor card. And though there is no conclusive proof about the existence of cellular memory, this deft, intelligent novel explores the human anxiety that replacing a heart is the closest one can come to replacing a soul. And it further expounds Dawson’s personal belief in a collective consciousness of the Fens, marginalised and exploited, but undiminished in its sense of identity over time. Alfred Hickling [...] Read more...
Review of TELL-TALE HEART in the Times Literary Review
February 28, 2014Over the course of The Tell-Tale Heart, we watch as Patrick, an unhealthy fifty-year-old academic, changes from a grubbily sensuous, selfish egotist to someone chastened and purified, much to the sur-prise of his children and ex-partners. What’s got into him? A new heart, figuratively as well as literally; Dawson leaves no meta-phor unturned in this searching and gently philosophical novel poised on the edge of the darkness that surrounds a human life. Although Patrick is not particularly pleasant, his thoughts, as he lies in a Cam-bridgeshire hospital, are amusing to over-hear. He has been a compulsive womaniser all his life; we register his disgruntlement that the transplant coordinator Maureen is so unprepossessing: ‘She has the hair texture of a jack Russell terrier and she’s small for a grown woman, more the size of a leprechaun.’ He notes with awe her knack for mismatching items of hideously hued clothing. The knowledge that the heart he received was that of a 16-year-old boy, killed in a motorcycle accident, ruf-fles Patrick’s genial obnoxiousness. Who is he to live, while this innocent boy died? In one startling scene, he feels as if the boy’s heart itself wants out. ‘It’s trying to get out! It’s escaping!’ he shrieks, as nurses come running. Maureen purveys some mystical ideas about remnants of donor conscious-ness transferring to patients through their new organs. Patrick finds himself won-dering where, if anywhere, the self resides: Aristotle wasn’t very impressed with the cold, wet matter of the brain. These days neuroscience is king, isn’t it? That’s where people think emotions are located. Cranio-centrism over cardio-centrism. The brain has won over the heart, you could say.’ It certainly has up to now in Patrick’s case. Interrupting Patrick’s solipsism is a first-person account of the historical Littleport riots of 1816, which lifts the story into another dimension. Young Drew Beamish, Patrick’s donor, was descended from one of the (real-life) rioters who were hanged for protesting against oppressive landlord farm-ers. Perhaps certain qualities — stubbornness, a burning desire for justice — reside in the blood, persisting down centuries. Another section brings us Drew himself, passionate about history and the Fens, and not too young to have suffered a broken heart. Switching back and forth between Drew’s life and Patrick’s, Dawson sketches many parallels. Country boy Drew, keen on wildlife, notes every bird movement and call; Patrick finds himself strangely moved and stirred by the sight of an owl or a kes-trel. What does it all mean? ‘What the fuck is a life — my life —for?’ as Drew puts it. I’ve … swapped my life with this strange Fen boy’s life in some way… that’s not right at all, what can a boy like that possibly have to teach me?’ Patrick is still demanding at the end of the book. Perhaps in acknowledge-ment that there can be no definitive answers to such questions, The Tell-Tale Heart melts gently away in conclusion. Perhaps a better life has been swapped for a lesser life; but, as this moving and intriguing novel suggests, the final sum amounts to a lot more than zero. Suzi Feay [...] Read more...
Daily Express review of TELL-TALE HEART
February 24, 2014Dawson, whose previous novels include Fred and Edie, shortlisted for the Whitbread and the Orange Prizes, is an elegant but easy writer. She swiftly hooks the reader in with strong, convincing narrative voices, pacy dialogue, carefully crafted prose and an engagingly dramatic plot. Important too is one of Dawson’s trademarks, an evocative, brooding sense of location…… a thought-provoking novel about identity, relationships, fate and what we would change if given a second chance. Guilia Rhodes [...] Read more...
Review for TELL-TALE HEART in The Lady
February 24, 2014This absorbing novel tells the story of a 50-year-old professor’s exploration of identity after receiving a heart transplant. Patrick, an alcoholic and a womaniser, is granted a second chance by accepting the heart of an ill-fated 17-year-old. He then embarks on a mission to find out all he can about his donor. Dawson skilfully entwines the lives of two vastly different characters to create a touching journey. The backdrop of rural Cambridgeshire provides a calm setting that mirrors Patrick’s new approach to life. A witty, uplifting account of self-discovery and change in middle age. Sarah Fortescue [...] Read more...
TELL-TALE HEART launch party
February 22, 2014Jill Dawson (middle) with fellow authors Louise Doughty and Richard Skinner at the launch party for The Tell-tale Heart [...] Read more...
Daily Mail review of THE TELL-TALE HEART
February 22, 2014Worn out by drinking and womanising, the heart of 50-year-old academic Patrick is about to give out. In its place is transplanted the lusty young heart of a teenager, Drew Beamish, killed in a motorcycle accident. From the start, Patrick is unconvinced of the rightness of his new life. Can Drew’s consciousness somehow impinge on his own? He senses he is not quite the same person and intrigued by his anonymous donor, he sets about discovering who Drew Beamish was and the nature of the forbidden love he had embarked upon before his untimely death. He finds that Drew was the descendant of one of the celebrated local Littleport rioters in 1816; that he had been expelled from school, and that he had loved birds. Set in the rural Cambridgeshire fens, this is a tender and thoughtful novel which explores some fundamental questions about identity and the symbolism of the heart. Carla McKay [...] Read more...
Review of TELL-TALE HEART – Bookmunch
February 19, 2014‘An accomplished novel by a great writer’ Patrick, 50, Professor of American Studies, womaniser – he has an ex-wife and two children, an ex-mistress and a third child almost the same age as his second, and a mature student ex-lover who’s filed a complaint of sexual harassment against him – is only the third person to have a beating-heart transplant. As the novel begins, Patrick is in recovery in a hospital in Cambridgeshire: ‘I have a sudden tiny image of myself, lying in the operating theatre, my chest sprung open like a birdcage, with the door wide and the bird flown. Robbed. Like Thomas Hardy; wasn’t he, horribly, buried without his heart? Some dim memory of a story about a biscuit tin. The dog eating the heart, which had been kept in a biscuit tin, and Hardy’s friends having to bury someone else’s heart. Body and soul separated.’ The irony of this, of course, is that Patrick’s donor will be buried without his heart but Patrick, in his selfishness, hasn’t considered this yet. He’s too busy berating and patronising his surgeon, his nurse and the transplant co-ordinator. What has made him curious, however, is the hallucination – or is it a memory? – he had in the theatre of a kestrel flying above him while he stood upon a long, flat grey road. The only thing he knows about his new heart was that it came from Littleport, the largest village in East Cambridgeshire. Surrounded by the fens, it was an island before they were drained. ‘No man is an island. Littleport was. I am now. A strange man, unlike any other. I’m a burglar, carrying off the heart of someone else, one that doesn’t belong to me. I’d like to go back to my old self, to my old life, but I have a curious, powerful certainty: my old self won’t have me.’ Three weeks after the transplant takes place, the local paper runs a story on it and includes details of the donor – ‘a sixteen-year-old youth, Andrew Beamish of Littleport. He died in a motorcycle accident, in a remote and rural part of the Fens’. Now Patrick’s curiousity about Drew Beamish and his family is ‘intense’. Dawson weaves the story of the Beamish family between that of Patrick’s, beginning with an ancestor of his, Willie Beamiss, who – along with his father – was involved in the Ely and Littleport Riots of 1816. The Beamiss’ were poor farm labourers at a time when the disparity between their employers and themselves was significant and when a meeting to determine who would benefit from that year’s poor relief became a mob rioting over their discontent, Willie Beamiss senior was at the front, inciting the crowd. When the rioters came to trial, the intention of the judge was to set an example: ‘To crush ‘those very daring acts of outrage’ – to show that none of us who rioted would be spared. To show it had nothing to do with poverty or need and to point out that the inhabitants of Ely is more ‘rude and uncivilised’ than anywhere else. The conduct of the rioters was not due to poverty, or bad crops, the court was told, because all the prisoners was robust men receiving great wages, too frequently wasted in drunkenness.’ Willie Beamiss senior was hanged alongside four other men. It’s not difficult to draw a parallel with the riots that took place across England in 2011 and perhaps the transplant of Drew Beamish’s heart into his body will help Patrick understand those who live a very different lifestyle to his own. The dual narrative is skillfully done; rather than having Patrick tell us what he discovers, Dawson writes Willie Beamiss’ story, and then Drew’s, in their own words. It means they’re allowed to own their own tale – their own identities – rather than have it reclaimed by those who’ve taken so much from them over the centuries. It also means that as a reader, we invest in the Beamiss’ story and empathise with them. The Tell-Tale Heart is an examination of class, of what it’s like to be middle-aged middle class man and also what it feels like to be a working class teenage boy. It’s about what makes us who we are. At several points in the novel, someone mentions to Patrick a theory about those who have transplants: ‘That patients who having heart surgery change, take on the personality of their donor in some way, and maybe their dreams, their memories too. There’s quite a well-known study and a book by this woman who started craving chicken nuggets and green peppers and what do you know – turns out her heart donor was a young lad who loves those foods.’ Dawson plays on this idea throughout the novel – has Patrick taken on some of Drew Beamish’s personality or are the changes he makes caused by coming so close to death? She prevents this thread from becoming sentimental by Patrick’s relentless skepticism – ‘Is he expecting me to take this seriously?’ – as we are left to wonder how serious it is ourselves. Any Cop?: The Tell-Tale Heart is an accomplished novel by a great writer. The prose sings and I wanted to savour it but the plot’s so interesting, I found myself racing through it instead. Highly recommended. Naomi Frisby [...] Read more...
Times review of TELL-TALE HEART
February 17, 2014‘Dawson’s immediately engrossing narrative opens in the ICU in the aftermath of the surgery and it is clear that the recipient of Drew’s heart is someone not everyone would consider deserving of a second chance……Dawson navigates this territory with a freshness and wit that belie a seasoned novelist. In 200 short pages, she seamlessly elides political history and neurophysiology with the madness that makes people drive too fast and seduce their students.’ Melissa Katsoulis [...] Read more...
Huffington Post review of TELL-TALE HEART
January 23, 2014As they attempt to reach out, you often hear the older generations baffled by the decisions of the younger. Such endeavours to connect go unnoticed by the Smartphone generation, with their Monster energy drinks and fanatical need to include the word “like” into every sentence. A gulf of years and accepted taboos split them apart, resulting in misunderstanding and ignorance. At the hospital bedside of Patrick, a 50-year-old professor of American studies, drinker and woma niser, our narrator begins to detail the transformative days that follow shortly after his heart transplant. Due to Patrick’s age and the nature of his life up until the transplant, as I read something curious happened. Come as early as page 30, Patrick had become Paul, my father. Everyt Set in the rural Cambridgeshire Fens, Patrick begins to feel a connection to his hearts previous owner; a teenage boy called Drew. Battling with his old life from which he feels increasingly distant, choosing instead to embrace the enormous sense of wellbeing pulsing from his new heart and the overwhelming degree of regret he feels for having it wasted on someone like him.hing about Patrick reminded me of him; how he dealt with his children, his regret and even his words realising the bleak and atmospheric backdrop of the English countryside. I was immediately engrossed. Following a breach of Hospital protocol Drew’s name is accidently revealed to Patrick and thus begins his intensely curious investigations. What follows is an engrossing chronicle of two highly tangible characters who build a sturdy tale able to bridge the gap between very distant generations. Jill Dawson, the much celebrated novelist has produced a work of fiction that I expect, in the not so distant future, will appear on reading lists of many English Literature degrees. Her tale of identity, the symbolic meaning of the heart and the possibility of change is woven together with care like silk through cotton. It is an elegant understanding of how two separate men might think of themselves, their world and those they care for most. As wise as it is witty, Dawson’s skilful storytelling constructs a unique look at how one deals with another life, if given a second chance. Split into seven parts, her prose absorbs the reader into a beautifully crafted novel that will extend many a reading afternoon. The Tell-Tale Heart is published by Sceptre and available to order from Amazon. [...] Read more...
Jill Dawson in Marrakesh
September 27, 2013Angela Robertson, the organiser writes of the week Jill spent teaching in Marrakesh: ‘I have to say I was very impressed by how much you packed in and made people work during the lessons, while at the same time allowing them to have lots of time to write. You are also an excellent mentor and really made me think about how important that is to the course. You made everyone feel relaxed and comfortable enough to share their work, and very much inspired to continue. You are the perfect tutor for this kind of retreat – professional, nurturing and great fun to hang out with…. I really thought you were fantastic and I know everyone else agreed.’ And Rosie Nixon, participant, said simply: ‘Jill, you are awesome!’ [...] Read more...
Lucky Bunny chosen as Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
October 30, 2012‘Lucky Bunny (Sceptre), Jill Dawson’s rip-roaring story of an East End girl made good by being defiantly bad; hilarious, poignant and exquisitely written.’ ‘Dawson’s engaging seventh novel (after Trick of the Light) chronicles the exploits of “Queenie” Dove, a highly intelligent Depression-era child from a family of grifters. As a child in London, Queenie acknowledges her fledgling conscience, but muses, “The world is full of milk on doorsteps. And bread left by the baker’s vans, and coal from the coal man.” ‘ Publisher’s Weekly read more… [...] Read more...
Galle Literary Festival
October 30, 2012Jill Dawson was invited to take part in the Galle Literary Festival in 2011. The trip was supported by the British Council ‘My Galle festival experience was wonderful, Sri Lanka itself (my first visit) was enthralling. Everyone, from the Sri Lankan air stewardess in her kingfisher colours who greeted me at the airport with my name on a stick and whisked us through customs, to the tuktuk drivers who ferried us around the Galle Fort, to the Festival volunteers, were so friendly, calm and helpful. The Galle Festival programming was intelligent, ambitious and imaginative, and I loved the fact that for once, I was on a panel with three great writers who had much to say on the topics that interest me – you can’t imagine how often I’m lumped together with writers I have nothing at all in common with, usually because we’re all women and the programmers assume we’ll have plenty to talk about. If that wasn’t enough there was the location itself. The sea, the cocktail parties, the glamorous hotels, the generosity, the delicious food – (Felix is still going on about the lime basil sorbet he had at the Dutch House); the Sri Lankan wildlife – monkeys playing in the treetops while I gave my breakfast talk at the top of Lady Hill hotel, baby crocodiles on our river safari ….and can you believe it – to top all that we even saw a blue whale on our fabulous, unforgettable trip with ‘whalehead’ Phillip Hoare – well, it all adds up to one of the most memorable week’s of my life, and definitely the best literary festival I’ve ever attended.’ [...] Read more...
The Great Lover
October 30, 2012What do people know of the poet Rupert Brooke? That W.B Yeats described him as ‘the handsomest young man in England’? That he was part of a circle that included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, the painter Augustus John, James and Lytton Strachey? That he died young, on his way to Gallipoli and was thereafter taken up as a national icon, the golden boy poet of the First World War? Or possibly only that he wrote the lines: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England…’ read more… …proof that presently its author is one of the finest practitioners of the literary historical novel…and that this is her best novel yet. Siobhan Harvey, New Zealand Dominion Post This captivating novel gives voice to Rupert Brooke himself in a tale of mutual fascination and inner turmoil, set at a time of great social unrest. Revealing a man far more complex and radical than legend suggests, it powerfully coveys the allure and curse of charisma. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan Book Club …a daring experiment, and one whose mood, setting and eccentricities linger in the mind. Joanna Briscoe, The Guardian This brilliant, complicated man is the centre of Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover, and while she draws extensively on historical records of Brooke and his contemporaries, it is her decisions as a novelist that make this account of his life fascinating as well as faithful. Helen Dunmore, The Times Dawson has pulled off the risky gamble of reimagining history. The New Statesman This is a seductive book, evocative and well paced, the tale split between Brooke and Nell, the two narrative voices strong, distinctive and consistent. Scotland on Sunday The speed and rhythms of rural life, and the greater sense of the wider world of pre-war turbulence, of suffragettes laying siege to the status quo, and artists’ coteries flouting convention – all this is rendered so unfussily, and in writing polished for clarity, not dazzling effect, that the reading becomes an almost physical pleasure. The Scotsman Dawson has followed Brooke’s lead, and her moving, intelligent, beautifully written and hugely enjoyable novel is alive with vivid descriptions of the world her characters inhabit. Peter Parker, Sunday Times This is a compelling portrait of a failed love affair and of a damaged man who is so cut off from the world that, to paraphrase the book’s epigraph from DW Winnicott, he cannot allow himself to be found by those around him. Lorna Bradbury, Daily Telegraph To translate this well-known figure into a novel, with all his contradictions, requires capacious knowledge and a gifted imagination. Fiction and fact are here blended with sureness and subtlety. The Independent Jill Dawson has created a convincing world of huge pathos; a subtle, evocative anti-fairy-tale of doomed youth by one of Britain’s most subtle and accomplished writers. Waterstone’s Books Quarterly Dripping with deliciously sensual allsuions to beekeeping, this is an elegantly entwined story of self-discovery and wild, poetic love. Good Housekeeping The Great Lover is not only engaging and seductive, it is also clever, witty and artfully designed. Times Literary Supplement Nell is a wonderfully vivid creation: resilient, intelligent and heart-breakingly innocent, she represents the other, working-class England that often gets overlooked in accounts of ‘giddy young people sleep-walking towards war’ as Dawson puts it. Dawson deftly works endless ironies into the gaps between these two narratives, and manages not only an impressive evocation of Brooke’s milieu but a compelling reassessment of a poet often dismissed by modern readers as a poster boy for limp-wristed, tea-sipping Toyrism. Time Out read all the reviews… The Great Lover was published by Sceptre in January 2009. Order from Amazon.co.uk Order from Amazon.com [...] Read more...

ABOUT JILL DAWSON

Paperback edition of The Language of Birds now available from Sceptre.

Paperback edition of The Language of Birds
now available from Sceptre.