Frome author launches debut novel

HOLIDAY souvenirs are something we often pop into a drawer and forget about but what Liz Hutchinson brought home from her two week holiday in the Greek island of Lesvos has been a major factor in her life for more than a decade.

For her ‘souvenir’ of that holiday was the seed of an idea for a trilogy based on the mediaeval history of the Aegean island, and though that seed grew only slowly, it is now flowering with the publication of the first of her three books, ‘Sigura’.

Liz started working on ‘Sigura’ when she was commuting between her then home in Newmarket and Cambridge, where she was HR manager for Downing College. The train journey was fairly short but gave her the opportunity to put pen to paper and make use of the research she had made into life in 15th century Byzantium.

But it wasn’t until she retired and moved to Frome in 2011 to be near her son and his family that she was able to start turning the notes she had made into the 260-page novel that’s now available through Amazon, both as an eBook on Kindle and as a paperback. 

“I was nervous of actually starting to write a novel but when I began a Community Education course, ‘Craft Your Novel’ with Jill Harris and Jane Elmor, I felt I had all the tools and encouragement I needed,” she said. “Even then, it took another seven years of review by my friends at ‘bootcamp’, the weekly summer get together of aspiring local authors, and the Silver Crow Books team, and then only after three or four re-writes before I reached the point where ‘Sigura’ could see the light of day.”

Silver Crow Books was established in 2016 with the specific aim of providing members of Frome Writers’ Collective, of which Liz is a stalwart and very active member, with a middle path between traditional and DIY publishing. ‘Sigura’ is the eighth book to bear the Silver Crow logo and with two more in the pipeline, all 10 will be celebrated at the Merlin Theatre at the end of March.

‘Sigura’ follows the adventures of Nabila, who is desperate to escape and see the world, despite the wishes of her father, the commander of the fortified town, Sigura, where they live. She places her trust in Alexis, a man sworn to take revenge on her father, and thus gambles with both her honour and her life. 

Liz had not done any writing before she started on ‘Sigura’ though she describes herself as having been quite a ‘spinner of yarns’ when she was at school but she has already written the sequel, ‘The Morea’ with the final book in the trilogy, as yet untitled, well under way.

So why did she choose to set the books in the Byzantine period?

“I have an abiding memory, I think from the ‘Swift Annual’ of about 1960, of a story set in Byzantium with an illustration of a man dressed in black on a black horse on a starlit cobbled lane. I knew that the atmosphere this scene evoked was one that I would love to re-create. 

“Then when I was on holiday on Lesvos I spent much of my time on the beach gazing out to sea and watching the sky and the sea and it was then that the final crisis in ‘Sigura’, its setting and main characters came to me in the course of a couple of days. 

“The island is really remote and must have been completely isolated in Mediaeval times – a truly blank canvas for the imagination to play upon.”