Summer Book Launch Event

Please join us for a special online Zoom event on Thursday 27 July, when we will be celebrating four new books by WSG members. Each author will be giving a short, informal talk about their work, followed by a Q&A session.

This event is free and open to everyone. Why not come along for some summer reading inspiration?

Reserve your place now on Eventbrite: Summer Book Launch Event – Online Tickets, Thu 27 Jul 2023 at 19:00 | Eventbrite

COME AND MEET OUR GUEST AUTHORS:

Charmian Kenner is a researcher and writer on women’s history, with a special interest in Latin America. She will discuss her free eBook Revolutionary Partners: Sarah Andrews and British campaigners for Latin American independence.

Revolutionary Partners asks: How did a young woman from Yorkshire meet a Venezuelan revolutionary in the year 1800? This is the story of Sarah Andrews and Francisco de Miranda, whose London home served as a British headquarters for the struggle to liberate Latin America from Spanish rule. Their sons Leander and Francisco took up the cause, joining many Britons who crossed the Atlantic to fight alongside Simón Bolívar or witness the dawn of a new society. All were partners in the revolution, but their contribution is little-known in Britain today, and Sarah Andrews has remained in the shadows.

Peter Radford is an Olympic medallist and world record holder, and Professor at the University of Glasgow and Brunel University. He will discuss his new monograph They Run with Surprising Swiftness: The Women Athletes of Early Modern Britain.

Sports have never been the sole preserve of men; women athletes have always been there. As this book shows, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, women of all ages ran, fought, rode, played football, cricket, tennis, and other sports. They competed in tough, head-to-head events that required extraordinary endurance and skill. They Run with Surprising Swiftness recognizes these remarkable athletes and their achievements and aims to restore them to their rightful place in the long history of women in sport.

Sara Read is a Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Her research is in the cultural representations of women, bodies and health in the early modern era.

Her second novel The Midwife’s Truth is a sequel to The Gossips’ Choice and continues the story of midwife Lucie Smith. The birth stories, which form the backdrop to the novels, are inspired by the case notes of a Bristol midwife published in 1737. The books mix humour, compassion, and sorrow, and have been scrupulously researched.

Kim Sherwood is an award-winning author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her latest novel, A Wild and True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”

The novel opens during the Great Storm of 1703, as smuggler Tom West confronts his lover Grace for betraying him to the Revenue. Leaving Grace’s cottage in flames, he takes her orphaned daughter on board ship disguised as a boy to join his crew. But Molly, or Orlando as she must call herself, will grow up to outshine all the men of his company and seek revenge – and a legacy – all of her own.