When I was twelve, my parents first took me and my younger brother to France. I still remember our first meal there – such wonderful food! It was the start of a life-long urge to travel, to discover other places, languages and cultures. I was born in London, England, went to boarding school, spent a year in Lausanne, Switzerland as an au pair girl, then went to Girton College, Cambridge, to read History. I came back to London after that, to do a postgraduate degree in Education.
I was offered a teaching job in the US at that point – but it was not to be; I married a fellow student instead and we had two children, who are now adults and live in the UK. We lived in Cambridge, then Leicester, then in Edinburgh, Scotland for 12 years. In between, we spent a year in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France.
All my life I have wanted to explore the world, and to write. Like many others, I started with horse and adventure stories in exercise books, then my grandmother gave me her Olivetti typewriter, and I began in earnest. My first novel, A Day To Remember To Forget was accepted by Macmillan, London, to my astonishment, when I was twenty-seven. After that, Macmillan took my next two novels, and I thought – again, like many others – I was launched and on my way. But a writer’s life is never straightforward – there was a hiatus, when we lived in France, and then a novel I wrote there was picked up by Harvester Press, and published both in the UK and the US. It was the first of several novels that I have set in France, which still seems still to be the place where inspiration resides.
Many decades later, after spending time in Australia and Morocco, I came to Key West, married again, began writing more fiction and poetry, much of it set in the Florida Keys as well as in France. My novel about my parents’ experience during World War 2, The Third Swimmer won a Silver Indie Award in 2015. My two historical novels set in France were Becoming George Sand and The Love Letters of Henri Fournier. The University of Iowa Press commissioned my book about Virginia Woolf, Miss Stephen’s Apprenticeship. I was chosen as Creative Writing Fellow at the College of William and Mary in 2007 and again in 2012, and was Key West’s second Poet Laureate. I have now lived in Key West for thirty years with my American husband, but spend part of the year in England and in Paris.
Indigo Sky at Noon, my new novel with RHP, is set in a house in the Lubéron that I visited some years ago with a college friend who lived nearby; I have borrowed it from Mary-Kay Wilmers, whose house it was, and who edited the London Review of Books for many years. Everything that happens in my novel is freely invented, but I thank Mary-Kay belatedly for the use of her pool.
Regal House Publishing is delighted to bring you Rosalind Brackenbury’s Indigo Sky at Noon in the summer of 2027.
