Attica's Authors
Susanna Bell
Susanna was born in 1970. She travelled widely as a child, living in Germany, the US and the UK, spending her school years in wilder parts of the English Lake District. She studied history at Cambridge before joining the British Foreign Service in her mid twenties. Since then, her career has taken her to Poland, Iraq and Pakistan; she spent a few months in Jerusalem helping a documentary team, and learnt Arabic at universities in Oman and Pakistan. She is currently living in London and Lincolnshire. Her travels have been the inspiration for her novels, in which she hopes to capture some of the excitement of the unknown and the complexities of life as an Englishwoman abroad.
Stephanie McCarthy
Stephanie McCarthy obtained a BA in English from Southern Illinois University and a J.D. from Southern University School of Law. She is the author of Haunted Peoria, based on the folklore of her hometown, and her debut cozy/chick-lit mystery, Murder Actually. She is currently an attorney living in Peoria, Illinois with her husband and three lively children. In her free time she enjoys reading mysteries, writing mysteries and plotting the elaborate deaths of her enemies (take that, Comcast guy). She blogs about mysteries at Love is Murder and guestblogs for Smitten by Britain and Criminal Elements.
G.W. Kennedy
Born in Elmhurst, IL, GW Kennedy received a BA with honors in English from Rice University in Houston and attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia for a year on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, receiving an MA . He completed his PhD in English at SUNY/Buffalo in the 1970s, writing a dissertation on Dickens’ novels, and was an English professor at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois from 1972 to 1978, when he left academia to pursue a career in business writing and corporate communications. He has published short stories in several literary magazines, as well as a number of articles and essays, including two that appeared as Chicago Tribune “op-ed” pieces. His story “Skeets,” which appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, received an award for literary excellence from the Illinois Arts Council.
Marsali Taylor
Marsali Taylor grew up near Edinburgh, and came to Shetland as a newly-qualified teacher. She is currently a part-time teacher on Shetland’s scenic west side, living with her husband and two Shetland ponies. Marsali is a qualified STGA tourist-guide who is fascinated by history, and has published plays in Shetland’s distinctive dialect, as well as a history of women's suffrage in Shetland. She's also a keen sailor who enjoys exploring in her own 8m yacht, and an active member of her local drama group.
Lucile Duff Gordon
Born Lucy Sutherland in London in 1863, she turned to dressmaking to make a living for herself after her marriage collapsed in 1893, and quickly found herself, as 'Lucile', one of the superstar designers of her day, pioneering the use of models and the catwalk show over her long and colourful fashion career as proprietor of Maison Lucile. She married Scottish landowner Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon in 1900, and the two became notorious following allegations of ungentlemanly conduct on his part during the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. She died in 1935.
Author webpage created by Attica Books
Luba Lesychyn
Soon after finishing her graduate studies in history, Luba landed on the doorstep of Canada’s largest museum, the Royal Ontario Museum where she worked for more than 20 years. Moving from positions in the education and programs departments to the museum’s consulting branch, she concluded her career in the office that managed the museum’s recent controversial architectural renovation. After leaving the museum, Luba worked for several years in an administrative and research capacity for a private museum consulting firm with offices in Toronto and London. She currently works in the educational sector and teaches yoga in her home town of Toronto.
Theft by Chocolate is Luba’s debut novel though she has been amusing people with her writing since the age of eight. Her love of chocolate precedes this age and she has been in and out of chocolate rehab for most of her adult life. When not writing or looking for her next chocolate fix, Luba can be found in dance classes, trekking to remote waterfalls in the mountain rain forest in Puerto Rico, running through the streets of Paris or any other number of calorie-burning activities that help offset her chocolate intake.
Theft by Chocolate will be available from all online outlets spring 2012.
Author website
Anselm Audley
Anselm Audley studied ancient and modern history at Oxford, with sojourns at UC Berkeley and the British School at Rome. More recently he has gained a degree in planetary science as well, undertaking fieldwork in the vicinity of volcanoes whenever possible, but is currently on the run from academia with a venture into publishing. He is the author of four books set on the ocean world of Aquasilva - the trilogy Heresy, Inquisition, and Crusade (published by Simon & Schuster 2001-3, and translated into six languages) and Vespera, previously published only in Spanish translation.
Author website
Elizabeth Aston Edmondson
Elizabeth Aston was born in Chile to an impeccably English father and a distinctly un-English Argentine mother. Educated by Benedictine nuns in Calcutta, Fabians in London, and Inklings at Oxford, she has lived in England, India, Malta and Italy. Her Mountjoy books (originally published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1993-8, under the pen-name Elizabeth Pewsey) were inspired by years of living in York, where her son was a chorister at the Minster, and depict the unholy, unquiet, and frequently unseemly goings-on of an (imaginary) northern cathedral city and its peculiar surroundings. As Elizabeth Edmondson, she has drawn heavily on her English origins in the Lake District, but also on her family's deep and often turbulent involvement in the Cold War, from Cambridge in the Thirties to Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Autumn of Nations.