Sarah Wise (born ca. 1966) is an English journalist, academic guest lecturer, tutor, and author of books on 19th-century social history for the general reader.
In 1984 Sarah Wise matriculated at the University of Southampton, where she graduated in 1988 with a B.A. in English literature. She was from January to June 1985 an exchange student with Rutgers University in New Jersey, thus giving her an excellent opportunity at the age of 19 to explore New York City. After graduating from the University of Southampton, she became a journalist, working in production for the magazine Marie Claire , which launched its UK print edition in 1988. After becoming Marie Claire's chief sub-editor and production editor, she resigned to pursue a career as a freelance journalist with a focus on the arts. She wrote articles for The Guardian , The Independent on Sunday , The Observer Magazine , and The Times , as well as other newspapers and magazines. While working as a freelance journalist, she attended evening classes as part of a joint honours course offered by the English and history departments of Birkbeck College, University of London. The course was for an M.A. in Victorian Studies. While researching her essays for the M.A., she became familiar with the historical incidents that became the basis for her first two books. [1] She completed her M.A. degree in 1996. [2]
At the age of 23, Sarah Wise began her career as a freelance journalist, living in London. Throughout her career she has written with a strong focus on the reader, or readership, that she keeps in her mind. Her idea of the reader in her audience arises from her thinking about someone, perhaps a close friend, who is "intelligent, open-minded, curious, but without any specialised knowledge." [3] In 2004, her first book The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London was published by Jonathan Cape. The book won the 2004 Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction of the Crime Writers’ Association and was shortlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. [4] The 2004 book was the inspiration for The Frankenstein Chronicles , aired on ITV Encore in November 2005. Her second book The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (2008, The Bodley Head) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Wise's second book was part of the historical basis for the television series Victorian Slum House , aired by the BBC in May 2017. Her third book Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (2012, The Bodley Head) was shortlisted for the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize of the Wellcome Trust. [5] Her fourth book The Undesirables: The Law that Locked Away a Generation was published in early 2024. [6] She contributed a chapter to the best-selling book Charles Booth's London Poverty Maps, edited by Mary S. Morgan. [5] [7] Wise was a guest on Radio 4's In Our Time to talk about Charles Booth's work related to poverty and social reform in London. She has also appeared on the BBC's television series ‘'Who Do You Think You Are?’' as a history expert. [5]
Her interests include the working classes in Victorian England, London in fictional literature from the early 1800s, the slum fiction of the late 1800s, 19th-century mental health history, and Victorian literature's portrayals of altered mental states. [8] Sarah Wise teaches writing techniques and 19th-century social history and related literature to both undergraduates and older adult learners. [5] She is a visiting professor in the University of California English for Academic Purposes (UCEAP) program of the London Study Center. [9] [10] At City University of London, when she teaches literary criticism on the Creative Writing Non-Fiction Masters, she emphasises to her students two main rules: "never bore your reader; and don’t confuse your reader". [3]
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link) [11] {{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link)William Trevor Cox, known by his pen name William Trevor, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.
Sarah Ann Waters is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.
Critical scholars have pointed to the status of women in the Victorian era as an illustration of the striking discrepancy of the United Kingdom's national power and wealth when compared to its social conditions. The era is named after Queen Victoria. Women did not have the right to vote or sue, and married women had limited property ownership. At the same time, women labored within the paid workforce in increasing numbers following the Industrial Revolution. Feminist ideas spread among the educated middle classes, discriminatory laws were repealed, and the women's suffrage movement gained momentum in the last years of the Victorian era.
Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation.
The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, centering taboo material shocking to its readers as a means of musing on contemporary social anxieties.
Catherine Fisher is a poet and novelist for children and Young Adults. Best known for her internationally bestselling novel Incarceron and its sequel, Sapphique, she has published over 40 novels and 5 volumes of poetry. She has worked as an archaeologist, as a school and university teacher, is an experienced broadcaster and adjudicator and has taught at the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd Writers' Centres. She lives in Wales, UK..
The Secret River is a 2005 historical novel by Kate Grenville about an early 19th-century Englishman transported to Australia for theft. The story explores what might have happened when Europeans colonised land already inhabited by Aboriginal people. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006, and has been compared to Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang for its style and historical theme.
Alyssa Brugman is an Australian author of fiction for young adults. She was born in Rathmines, a suburb of Lake Macquarie, Australia and attended five public schools before completing a Marketing Degree at the University of Newcastle. She resides in the Hunter Region.
Ira Mathur is an Indian-born Trinidad and Tobago multimedia freelance journalist, Sunday Guardian columnist and writer. The longest-running columnist for the Sunday Guardian, she has been writing an op-ed for the paper since 1995, except for a hiatus from 2003 to 2004 when she wrote for the Daily Express. She has written more than eight hundred columns on politics, economics, social, health and developmental issues, locally, regionally and internationally.
Gillian Elise Avery was a British children's novelist, and a historian of childhood education and children's literature. She won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1972 for A Likely Lad. It was adapted for television in 1990.
The Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society was an advocacy group started by former asylum patients and their supporters in 19th-century Britain. The Society campaigned for greater protection against wrongful confinement or cruel and improper treatment, and for reform of the lunacy laws. The Society is recognised today as a pioneer of the psychiatric survivors movement.
Monique Pauline Roffey is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.
Susan Elderkin is an English author of two critically acclaimed novels, her first, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains won a Betty Trask Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, her second, The Voices was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. She was one of Granta Magazine's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and won the 2007 Society of Authors Travel Award. She is the author, with Ella Berthoud, of The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies and The Story Cure: Books to Keep Kids Happy, Healthy and Wise.
Hannah Kent is an Australian writer, known for two novels – Burial Rites (2013) and The Good People (2016). Her third novel, Devotion, was published in 2021.
Burial Rites (2013) is a novel by Australian author Hannah Kent, based on a true story.
Cath Crowley is a young adult fiction author based in Melbourne, Australia. She has been shortlisted and received numerous literary awards including the 2011 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction for her novel Graffiti Moon and, in 2017, the Griffith University Young Adult Book Award at the Queensland Literary Awards for Words in Deep Blue.
Claire Zorn is an Australian writer of young adult fiction. She was awarded the CBCA Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers in 2015 and 2017.
Sarah Moss is an English writer and academic. She has published six novels, as well as a number of non-fiction works and academic texts. Her work has been nominated three times for the Wellcome Book Prize. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin's School of English, Drama and Film in the Republic of Ireland with effect from September 2020.
Fiona Anna Wood is an Australian writer of young adult fiction. She is a three-time winner of the Children's Book of the Year Award: Older Readers award.
Felicity Castagna is an Australian writer. She won the young adult fiction prize at the 2014 Prime Minister's Literary Awards for her book, The Incredible Here and Now and the 2022 Writing for Young Adults Victorian Premier's Literary Awards for her book, Girls in Boys' Cars.