A Celebratory Launch for two new novels by Hallam staff authors: Susan Elliot Wright and Yvonne Battle-Felton
Wine and snacks will be served.
Wednesday 10 April 6.00pm
Sheffield Hallam City Campus, Owen Level 11, the Staff-Student Space
Susan Elliot Wright graduated from the Hallam MA in 2008 with a completed draft of her first novel. After significant rewriting, the book found an agent, and eventually (after yet more rewriting) a publisher. The Things We Never Said was published by Simon & Schuster in 2013. This was followed by The Secrets We Left Behind in 2014, What She Lost in 2017, and most recently, The Flight of Cornelia Blackwood in February this year. This novel explores one woman’s experience of postpartum psychosis, and is described by Heat magazine as ‘a searing portrait of motherhood, mental ill-health and profound loss ’.
Susan grew up in South east London but moved to Sheffield in 2005 to do the MA here at SHU. She does not come from a literary background, left school at 16 with one O-level and didn’t go to university until she was in her 30s. After gaining a BA in English, she trained as a magazine journalist, writing hundreds of features for the women’s consumer market. She only really began to write fiction seriously in the early 2000s. She believes firmly that if she can write a novel, anyone can – with hard work, Persistence, and a thick skin. She now teaches on the course she herself took
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Yvonne is an American writer living in Lancashire. A writer of fiction and Creative Nonfiction, her writing has been published in literary journals and anthologies. Her debut novel, Remembered (February 2019) is published by Little, Brown/Hachette Group’s Dialogue Books in the UK and will be published by Blackstone Publishing in the US (date forthcoming). It has been long-listed for the 2019 Women’s Prize in Fiction.
Winner of a Northern Writers Award in fiction (2017), Yvonne was shortlisted for the Words and Women Competition (2017) and the Sunderland University Waterstones SunStory Award in 2018, and awarded a Society of Author’s Foundation Grant for Remembered in 2018. She was commended for children’s writing in the Faber Andlyn BAME (FAB) Prize (2017). Yvonne has six non-fiction children’s titles forthcoming with Penguin Random House.
Yvonne is represented by the Elise Dillsworth agency and holds an MA in Writing (Dual Concentration fiction and nonfiction) from Johns Hopkins University and a Creative Writing PhD from Lancaster University. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and Creative Industries at Sheffield Hallam University. Yvonne is a creative producer, writer, and is co-founder and co-Director of North West Literary Arts. Her aim is to increase diversity in publishing and to take over the world, one story at a time.
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