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Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer and the granddaughter of Windrush generation immigrants. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate on the English coast so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her Master's degree in Politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations, and her fieldwork in St. Lucia and Barbados helped inspire her first novel.
Eleanor Shearer's website
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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 ...
Sara Collins is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Grand Cayman and studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as a lawyer for seventeen years before doing a Master of Studies in Creative Writing at Cambridge ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
River Sing Me Home
Try:
The Confessions of Frannie Langton
by Sara Collins
Nathan Harris holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. He is a recipient of the University of Oregon's Kidd Prize and was a finalist for the Tennessee Williams Fiction Prize. He lives in Austin, Texas... (more)
If you enjoyed:
River Sing Me Home
Try:
The Sweetness of Water
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