Wendy Wallace.

Wendy Wallace is a novelist and non-fiction writer.  A Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, she mentors student writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Wendy’s novels explore the lives of Victorian women. Her first, The Painted Bridge, was set in a women’s asylum in Highgate in 1859. Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize, it won the 2014 Chambéry festival English first novel prize.

Her second, The Sacred River, is set in Egypt in the early 1880s at a time of political and social turmoil. Both are published by Simon & Schuster in the UK and Scribner in the US.

Wendy’s interests include Victorian social mores, early photography, echoes between past and present and characters forced into change. Her books have been translated into French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Japanese with a forthcoming edition of Daughter of Dust in Macedonian.

She is the author of two non-fiction books, Oranges and Lemons: a year in the life of an inner city primary school (Routledge) and Daughter of Dust: growing up abandoned in the desert of Sudan (Simon & Schuster), the story of a courageous Sudanese woman championing children born outside marriage in a conservative Muslim society.

Both non-fiction books came out of her work as a journalist, first writing about development in north Africa for Unicef and non-governmental organisations, later examining social issues in schools in features for the Times Educational Supplement. In 2004, she was Edexcel education journalist of the year.

Wendy Wallace lives in London, is married to photographer Mike Goldwater and has two sons.