Authors Electric

  The weirdest things have happened to me this month. I’ve been super-busy, as I always am. I’m reprising my role as Patricia Highsmith in a play, Writing Crime in Akenfield, by local author Suzanne Hawkes, which returns to the stage in October. I’ve also been editing my novel, which launches in December, and trying to help other creatives by championing their various projects. I lost two family members in the last fortnight, and so it got me thinking about how life changes and whether there is an afterlife. You know, simple little questions like that! I’m not a church-goer, and not a consciously religious person, but I would describe myself as quite a spiritual person, maybe an ‘intrigued agnostic’ and always happy to approach anything with an open mind. I have certainly had several interesting spiritual experiences which would not rule out the existence of some sort of afterlife, as they were too unusual to explain by any rational means. In a contemplative state of mind, I found ...

 In January 2024, I'm quite chuffed to say, my book The Ghost Drum was reviewed in The Times by Lucy Bannerman, as 'Children's Book of the Week.' Ghost Drum by Susan Price review — a rediscovered gem of a fairytale Narrated by a cat on a golden chain, this Carnegie winning story of a young shaman fighting back against a brutal ‘Czardom’ is breathtaking Lucy Bannerman Saturday January 27 2024, 12.01am, The Times My word. Ghost Drum isn’t just a gem; it’s the Fabergé egg of fairytales. Having fallen out of print, this electrifying story is now being reissued as part of Faber’s Young Adult Classics series and what a treat it is. We begin on a midwinter night “in a far-away Czardom” when a stranger knocks on the door and persuades a slave woman to hand over her newborn baby. “The snow is so deep that the houses are half-buried in it, and the frost so hard that it grips the houses and squeezes them till they crack.” The stranger is a (good) witch who raises th...