Today I’m delighted to welcome Philippa Rees to Victual Book Club, a series in which I put questions to authors. If you get to the end and there’s anything else you’d like to know, please feel free to post your questions.

Philippa was born in South Africa and fatherless and by the age of two, experienced the wildest of rural Africa in the care of her grandfather, on safari for weeks inspecting African schools. Otherwise she was imprisoned in boarding schools for a ‘British’ education. She has lived on deserted islands in the Indian Ocean; at the Max Planck Institute in Bavaria; lectured to mature Bristol University students; designed and built her own home, an arts centre and concert hall and raised four daughters. Her published works include Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God and A Shadow in Yucatan, a poetic evocation of the sixties in the Southern United States; winning short stories in Narrative Magazine and poetry in the ezine, The Recusant.

She lives in Somerset in her converted barns with a long-suffering husband.

Q: You generally write in the genre of narrative ‘symphonic prose’ CONTINUE READING