From Daily Mail award winner to indie author…
‘Jane Davis is one of my newfound heroes. A prizewinning literary author who tackles the trickiest of subjects.’ – Dan Holloway
‘One of the consistently compelling features of Jane Davis’ work is the elegance imbued within her writing style, which makes each title such a sumptuous treat.’ – BurfoBookish
Hailed by The Bookseller as ‘One to Watch’, Jane Davis writes thought-provoking literary page turners. Her debut, Half-Truths and White Lies, won a national award established with the aim of finding ‘the next Joanne Harris’. Further recognition followed in 2016 when Writing Magazine named An Unknown Woman its Self-Published Book of the Year. Then in 2019, Jane won the inaugural Selfies Book Award with Smash all the Windows.
Under pressure
Because Jane is interested in how people behave under pressure, she introduces her characters when they’re in highly volatile situations. Then, in her words, she throws them to the lions. Through her fiction, she explores a diverse range of themes, ranging from pioneering female photographers, to relatives seeking justice for the victims of a fictional disaster.
Missing persons
An issue she returns to time and time again is the impact that missing persons have on our lives. How the hole they leave can be so great that it dwarfs the people actually left behind. In I Stopped Time, the missing person was an estranged mother. She addressed the theme head-on in A Funeral for an Owl, with teenage runaways. And in These Fragile Things, mother Elaine is obsessed by the child she lost to a miscarriage, to the exclusion of the child she has.
The gingerbread house
Jane Davis lives in Carshalton, Surrey, in what was originally the ticket office for a Victorian pleasure garden. Locally, it is known as ‘the gingerbread house’. She frequently features her house in her fiction. In fact, she burnt it to the ground in the opening chapter of An Unknown Woman. It continues to provide a rich source of inspiration. Her latest novel, Small Eden, questions why one man would choose to open a pleasure gardens at a time when so many others were facing bankruptcy.
Jane’s favourite description of fiction is that it is ‘made-up truth.’
Find out more about her early years and her writing journey here.
Out and about
Take a look through my gallery for pictures of Jane out and about.
Photo Credit: Matthew Martin
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