About Me/Contact

Lydia Syson for blogLydia Syson grew up in Botswana and London and spent her early career as a BBC World Service radio producer.  Since then, she has written a PhD on Timbuktu (2003), a critically acclaimed biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, DOCTOR OF LOVE: JAMES GRAHAM AND HIS CELESTIAL BED (2008), and three novels for young adults published by Hot Key Books. Her YA books, set in the Spanish Civil War (A WORLD BETWEEN US – 2012) and World War Two (THAT BURNING SUMMER – 2013) and the Paris Commune of 1871, (LIBERTY’S FIRE – 2015), were loosely inspired in different ways by her own family history. Her adult fiction debut,  MR PEACOCK’S POSSESSIONS (2018), set on a remote volcanic island in Oceania in the 1870s, borrowed from the family history of her partner, who was born in New Zealand. As the ghostwriter of award-winning memoirs, she specialises in helping individuals tell compelling personal stories in relation to wider events in twentieth-century history.

Other work:

Lydia’s educational work includes academic writing workshops and other forms of writing support in universities, a variety of author events for schools (KS3-5), and also one-to-one mentoring for emerging writers of adult fiction and non-fiction. She also delivers free creative writing workshops for schools at the Wallace Collection . These can be booked via the museum’s education department.

Contact details:

Email Lydia at lydiasyson@gmail.com

You can follow her on Twitter: @lydiasyson

Lydia is represented by Catherine Clarke at Felicity Bryan Associates and for ghost work by Jennifer Christie at Graham Maw Christie


“A mesmerising portrait of a family unravelling” THE TIMES (Best historical fiction in 2018)

“Powerful, intense and beautiful” HISTORICAL NOVEL REVIEW

“This tense, evocative, richly-imagined novel conjures the voices of a strange time and place, and makes them universal” EMMA DARWIN

“Syson brings history alive” THE OBSERVER

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