Book: Amity & Sorrow
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Little, Brown (US); Headline (UK, Commonwealth); Orlando (Holland); Presses de la Cite (France), Sonzogno (Italy)
Publication date(s): Hardback: Spring 2013, Paperback: Spring 2014
About: Peggy Riley is a writer and playwright. Amity & Sorrow was published in the UK & Commonwealth with Headline/Tinder Press , Little, Brown in the US, and in translation in the Netherlands with Orlando, France with Cites de la Presses, and in Italy, Sonzogno. Recently, she was awarded a fellowship at Yaddo. Her short fiction has been published in Mslexia Magazine, as an app on Ether Books, and won a Highly Commended prize in the 2011 Bridport Prize. Her plays have been commissioned and produced off-West End, regionally, and on tour. She has been a festival producer, a bookseller, and writer-in-residence at a young offender prison. Originally from LA, Peggy now lives on the North Kent coast.
Website: www.peggyriley.com
Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Peggy-Riley/452729764798071
Twitter handle: @Peggy_Riley
Location: Kent
Writer Superpowers (specialist subjects): As a playwright and writer, I have run workshops, facilitated panels and spoken about the many facets of writing, from “how do you get new ideas” through to “how to edit” and “how to get your book published”. As my first book is about God, sex and farming, extreme faith and polygamy, I wrote articles and did numerous events about the history of cults and handmade faiths in America. (I was nearly sued by one such cult, for calling them a cult.) My second book, currently being edited, is about the women’s internment camp on the Isle of Man in WW2 and is about the history of racial profiling and fear of “otherness”. I am an authority on the history of the women’s camp and certainly feel qualified to discuss Britain’s relationship with German “enemy aliens” before and during WW2, fascism, WW2 and women’s writing, and issues around ethnology, Victorian/Imperial colonial collecting and how they relate to Nazi death camps, as well as about writing about wars and histories that are not “yours”. I do write about dark subjects but I’m really very friendly…
