Eleanor Shearer Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Eleanor Shearer discusses her first novel, River Sing Me Home, her inspiration to write the story, and the extensive research she carried out to write it.

This is your first novel. How long have you been working on it? And what inspired you to write River Sing Me Home?

This novel was inspired by the women in the Caribbean who really did go and try to find their stolen children after slavery ended. I first learned about these women at an exhibition I went to when I was sixteen, so it was almost ten years between having the initial idea and actually setting out to write the novel. The story of these women stayed with me all those years, because I thought it was such a powerful illustration of the way people in the Caribbean resisted slavery and resisted its destruction of their families. But it wasn't until 2020 and the pandemic that I started writing in earnest. I was lucky enough to have a job where I was working from home, and I thought, I'll never have more free time than I do now, so if I don't write this book now, I never will!

River Sing Me Home was influenced by a true story. Can you tell us more about that?

When I was sixteen, I went to an exhibition called Making Freedom, that was put on by the Windrush Foundation, a charity that celebrates the contribution of Caribbean people to the UK. Part of the exhibition mentioned that, when slavery ended, there were women who left ...