Carolyn Kirby
The real Janina
Janina and Mieczysław's wedding, and the couple at Poznan Aero Club (centre) in the 1930s Almost all of the characters in When We Fall...
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CAROLYN KIRBY
Award winning novelist
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Carolyn Kirby
- Oct 4, 2020
- 6 min
Thank you, Aggie!
After a decade of writing, the final component of my novel When We Fall was provided by a pioneer of women in aviation. When We Fall took...
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Carolyn Kirby
- May 12, 2020
- 5 min
Fifty Years of Fake News
At the heart of my novel, When We Fall, lies one of the most notorious crimes of the second world war; the murder of more than 22,000...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Apr 20, 2020
- 6 min
Kaffee or Kawa? National identity in When We Fall
Do you drink kaffee or kawa? It’s a serious question for the characters in my novel, When We Fall, because for them national identity is...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Dec 28, 2019
- 4 min
The Remarkable Life & Death of Janina Lewandowska: Or, 22,891 men and 1 woman
Soon after embarking on my novel about British women pilots in world war two, I began to consider adding a Polish strand to the story and...
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Carolyn Kirby
- May 27, 2019
- 5 min
The 'Maiden Tribute' Scandal
In the past few years, amateur paedophile hunters have rarely been far from the headlines of Britain’s tabloid newspapers. ‘The nation is...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Mar 17, 2019
- 3 min
More about Cora
Writing a work of fiction requires different muscles to writing history. The historian’s impulse is to prove an argument by inclusion of...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Jan 29, 2019
- 4 min
Massa and Maid
One night in 1851, as Hannah Cullwick looked into an open fire, she saw in the flames ‘a nice manly face with a moustache’ and knew that...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Jan 1, 2019
- 4 min
Measuring Man
Where does a novel come from? I can trace my first thoughts about the story that would become The Conviction of Cora Burns with a Google...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Nov 4, 2018
- 3 min
The Archway of Tears
Following the 1834 Poor Law and the extension of poverty relief by local Unions of parishes, the old workhouse in the centre of...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Oct 20, 2018
- 3 min
Why is The Conviction of Cora Burns set in Birmingham?
My journey started with Sir Francis Galton, the Victorian polymath who coined the phrase 'nature versus nurture' and provided the...
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Carolyn Kirby
- Oct 7, 2018
- 2 min
The True Story of Hannah Mulcay
by Carolyn Kirby From the study where I do my writing, I have a distant view of the Berkshire Downs and at the centre of that view,...
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