Sarah Burton

I am new to crime fiction writing (though not to fiction writing) and my latest book is Eliza Mace, co-authored with Jem Poster (pictured), published by Duckworth in March 2024. It’s the first in a series, set in the 1870s on the Welsh borders. Eliza gets into crime detection by chance, when her father goes missing, and the series will chart her development both as a young woman and as a detective. I am interested in the moral dilemmas facing characters, how people can do bad things for good reasons, and also in realism – presenting situations that could really happen, and, rather than fitting modern stories and characters into historical settings, finding criminal situations which are very much a product of their contemporary society.

I have also written historical fiction (The Strange Adventures of H, Legend, 2020), non-fiction, children’s fiction and humour. From 2013 I devised and ran Cambridge University’s Master’s degree course in Creating Writing (with Jem Poster), stepping back from this in 2017 to concentrate on my own writing. My first joint writing project with Jem was to get down on paper the best of our combined advice for developing writers, and this appeared as The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

We also run our own one-to-one mentoring scheme, Between the Lines, which aims to give writers the kind of help they want, over the time period they choose, at a fee that is not extortionate. (‘Mentoring’ is not a term I particularly like when it comes to writing, so we describe it as ‘creative support for writers’).

I’ve now found a better balance between writing and teaching creative writing and am enjoying a relatively guilt-free relationship with both – a treat! And it only took me 60 years…

Other Awards

The Strange Adventures of H was longlisted for the Guardian Not-the-Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Historical Fiction Debut Novel, and won the Audiofile Award for best historical fiction.

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