Friday 17 September 2021

Ann Wilkinson – award-winning writer mines tales from the coalfields of Durham

Ann Wilkinson’s earliest memories included tales told by her grandparents of life in the Durham coalfields. These sparked a fascination with social history and she spent years researching the world of those family memories, eventually producing her first novelA Sovereign For A Song (later reissued as Sing Me Home), that won the Romantic Novelists Association New Writers Award (now the Joan Hessayon Award) in 2003.

 

Ann’s debut novel became the first in a series of family sagas, as her research followed the fictional Wilde family in the years leading up to World War 1 and through the war itself.

Winning a Wife

No Price too High

Ann, now retired, enjoyed a long career in nursing, spending many years as a health visitor, ending up in the city of Hull. Using the experience of her own training, Ann went on to research medical nursing at the time of World War 2, and used the city of Hull, where she still lives, as the background to a new series of novels.

Hull, a key port, became a strategic target and suffered widespread destruction from 1941 to the end of World War 2. Ann’s second series was set against the backdrop of this war.

 

From here, Ann’s writing moved beyond world wars, but retained Hull as its setting. Her first post-war novel was The Would-be Wife.

Following this, Ann drafted The May Day Nurse, a novel set in 1950s Hull. Although the manuscript is complete, her publisher’s editorial process was significantly delayed by the 2020 global pandemic.

Learn more about Ann and her writing HERE.






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