Virginia BaIly
Represented by Nicola Barr
Virginia Baily is an award-winning author whose stories and poetry have been widely anthologized. She was born in Yorkshire but moved to Cardiff at the age of seven. She received a BA in French and Italian from the University of Exeter and has lived mostly in Devon since that time, garnering in the interim an MA and PhD in English, also from Exeter University.
Her first novel, AFRICA JUNCTION, published by Harvill Secker, was inspired both by her work as editor of the political series of the Africa Research Bulletin and by her travels in West Africa. It won the Society of Authors’ McKitterick prize in 2012 and she used the prize money to travel to Italy, rent an apartment in Rome and concentrate on writing and researching her second novel.
EARLY ONE MORNING, published in 2015 in the UK by Virago and in the US/Canada by Little, Brown, is being translated into German, Italian, French, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian and Portuguese. It was Waterstones and Goldsboro’s Book of the Month and was a Sunday Times Bestseller. A BBC Radio 4 adaptation was broadcast in October 2015.
Her third novel, THE FOURTH SHORE, will be published by Fleet in 2019.
She co-founded Riptide short story journal, now on its eleventh volume, and has worked as a language teacher, translator and editor.
She sets her narratives against a backdrop of historical events. Recurring themes are identity, kinship and otherness. She writes standing up in a corner of her office, facing a blank wall.