Patricia Finney's first novel "A Shadow of Gulls" had already been published when she went up to Oxford aged 18 to study History. While she was still in her first year her book won the David Higham Award for Best First Novel of the year and some fantastic reviews. By then she was also an established broadcast dramatist, gaining particular acclaim with the BBC Radio 3's production of her play The Flood. Patricia's second novel, The Crow Goddess, followed within a year to further acclaim.
As well as another award-winning radio play ("A Room Full of Mirrors"), she has published eighteen other novels, including three Elizabethan spy thrillers and nine Elizabethan crime novels, four childrens' books set in Elizabethan times and the two earlier Jack books - hilarious stories about Jack the daffy (present-day) Labrador dog and his Pack, written in Doglish. Kindle books include two historical crime novels set in 16th century London, the James Enys series, and Patricia Finney's first contemporary romantic thriller. Once languishing under dire titles like "Love without Shadows" and (sorry) "Pushing a Pea up your Nose", it now has a properly snappy title - LUCKY WOMAN.
Her career to date has also included stints as a newspaper columnist, freelance journalist, magazine editor, landlord, coffeeshop owner, baker and eater of cakes, stand-up historian, film scriptwriter and ebook entrepreneur. She came back to England after two and a half wonderful years in the south of Spain where she learnt Spanish, a little flamenco dancing and how to drink coffee and cognac at 8.00 in the morning (and why this is a bad idea). She returned to England so that her youngest son could go back to his lovely primary school for his final year.
Many years later, said youngest son is now a strapping 6'2" tall MMA enthusiast. Patricia Finney has just spent nearly seven years living near Budapest, Hungary. However, despite her love for the (hot, dry) Hungarian summers and Hungary in general, she has just moved back to Cornwall along with an enormous number of books and a harp which she doesn't (yet) know how to play. Blame the coronavirus.
The ebook publishing company Climbing Tree Books is going from strength to strength. The brave man known as the Publisher (who has come out as William Essex) is still coping with ebook uploading/ downloading/ sideloading/while also devising snappy titles and blurbs, as well as writing novels and non-fiction of his own. And designing cover art, something he's rather good at.
In April 2020 Patricia Finney released the ELIZABETHAN NOIR TRILOGY boxed set on Kindle - FIREDRAKE'S EYE, UNICORN'S BLOOD and GLORIANA'S TORCH all in one file.
She has finished her slightly strange thriller but doesn't yet know if it's any good. It's an experiment in a totally new way (to her) of writing books. She says there's a real upside to coronavirus for writers, which is that as everything is so crazy, she can be crazy too and she anyway spends most of her life sitting around at home typing on her laptop.
She has finished Carey 10 - A TASTE OF WITCHCRAFT in which Sir Robert Carey and Lady Elizabeth Widdrington finally... um... get together. This isn't a spoiler because it's historically what they actually did. However she presently has no idea when it will be published, possibly September 2021.
She's still working on a non-fiction book called "Walk in My Footsteps" which is about her Hungarian mother's adventures as a child in WWII and will include her Hungarian grandfather's handwritten autobiography which she only discovered in October 2019.
At the moment she's working on what she calls her Enys Origin story - the prequel to DO WE NOT BLEED and PRICED ABOVE RUBIES. No idea what the title will be but it's set in Gray's Inn at Christmas 1585.
And she wishes her hard-working Interstellar Idea Bats would give her a chance to get her breath between ideas.
