Rachel joyce trilogy
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About Rachel Joyce
Background Influences
I was born in 1962 in South East London and brought up on a small sixties urban housing estate with my two younger sisters, Amy and Emily. We read Beatrix Potter, Noel Streatfeild, Joan Aiken and made up a lot of games about imaginary countries and animals who wore bonnets.
I have written since I was a child. It was my haven, just as reading was my haven. I wrote my autobiography when I was eight because I was worried my writing talents had gone unnoticed. (I was right. They had.) When I was fourteen, I sent off a story secretly to a publisher under a pseudonym because I thought that might give me a better chance. I called myself Mary Thornton, which might sound like a box of chocolates, but was at the time a bow to Jane Eyre.
A Journey to Professional Writing
After studying English at Bristol University, I had a brief period where I worked unsuccessfully as a nanny. ( I was a nice nanny, but I was not a tidy one, and my cooking was exclusively of the baked potato and cheese variety.) I was very briefly a door to door sales person
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Welcome
Welcome
Rachel Joyce is the award-winning author of the the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, The Music Shop, and Miss Benson’s Beetle, as well as a collection of interlinked short stories, A Snow Garden & Other Stories.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and long listed for the Man Booker Prize. Rachel has been awarded the Specsavers New Writer of the Year National Book Award and shortlisted for the UK author of the year. Miss Benson’s Beetle was the winner of the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Her novels have sold over 5 million copies worldwide in thirty six languages.
Rachel’s writing career began in radio drama and she has written many afternoon plays for BBC Radio 4, as well as major adaptations of all the Bronte novels, and Henry James. In 2007 she jointly won the Tinniswood Award for best original audio drama.
Next year The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry will be a major
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Rachel Joyce (writer)
British writer
Rachel Joyce (born 1962) is a British writer. She has written plays for BBC Radio 4, and jointly won the 2007 Tinniswood Award for her radio play To Be a Pilgrim.[1][2] Her debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was on the longlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize,[3] and in December 2012 she was awarded the "New Writer of the Year" award by the National Book Awards for this book.[4]
She had an earlier career as an actress,[5] and has said that between her first writing ambitions aged 14 and the writing of her first novel she was "a young woman, a mother, an actress, a writer of radio drama - not to mention a terrible waitress in a wine bar, a door-to-door sales girl for one morning, and an assistant in a souvenir shop".[6]
She is married to actor Paul Venables, and lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and four children.
She is the sister of actress Emily Joyce.
Books
Awards
Reference List
External links
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