Gill Edmonds
GILL EDMONDS
Gill Edmonds was born in 1936 at Orpington in Kent and attended Bromley County Grammar School for Girls and, years later, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Married in 1960 she left two years later, with her husband and two little sons, for Boston, Massachusetts. After two years at MIT her husband decided to make a commitment to the college in Peshawar, Pakistan where his father was Principal.
Back in the United States in 1967 we lived for some years in Tennessee, where I began to start thinking seriously about becoming a writer. This was a period when many short stories were created but none offered for publication. Returning to England after my divorce in the 70s, I supported myself and my sons by teaching – a job for which I was hopelessly unsuited.
I had three books published, and well received by the critics, in the 1980s by Muller, Blond and White. A first novel, The Common, won the 1982 Sinclair Prize for Fiction. The second, The Album, is based on the life of one woman trying to raise her family alone during the First World War. The third was compiled from those short stories written years earlier, stories about The Silkie.
Three more books followed: Trouble House, the anatomy of a riot in Gloucestershire in 1830; The Diamond Collar the story of a black slave in England in the late 18th century and An Empress in England, a spy story involving the Empress Eugenie and her son the Crown Prince – all these are still living in the back of a drawer. A story set in 1st century Palestine, inspired by three months working on an Israeli dig in the Golan Heights remains unfinished.
In the intervening years, when I was a freelance copy editor, Education Guardian accepted a few articles; stranded penniless in Antigua in 1992, I there wrote a number of pieces for The Islands’ Nautical Scene (a free newspaper) until I earned my fare to Miami. During three years travelling and working around the United States (I have a Green Card) I succeeded in getting a couple of articles printed in the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe.
Back in England I became a sub-editor with Macmillan, working on the RHS Dictionary of Gardening with its editor, Anthony Huxley. When I left Macmillan I became editor of one half of the volumes of World Book Encyclopedia. In July 2004 The Oldie accepted an article on my clandestine experiences with The Voice of Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s (an illegal broadcasting wing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament!).
Since Jan 2002 I have lived with my husband, David Crane, on our Dutch barge, Owlpen, cruising the French waterways and writing up our adventures for Blue Flag, the magazine of the Dutch Barge Association. In January 2017 the Guardian asked me to write the obituary for my life-long friend author Hilary Bailey.
