Bio

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“I was terrified of books for much of my childhood. Words didn’t make sense. Sentences moved on the page, never staying still long enough for me to catch hold of them. Reading aloud in class was particularly traumatic, since I couldn’t seem to make my brain and my mouth connect in the right way. Thankfully, I had a bibliophile mum who insisted on torturing helping me by forcing encouraging me to read to her every day after she got home from work.

 I would read the requested pages with much frustration and promptly never touch them again. My mother provided me with all kinds of books—books she thought I would like. I particularly remember books about girls who rode horses, girls who moved to new and different countries and had to find their place, girls having to overcome terrible odds. It wasn’t until she brought home a book about a group of friends who discover a crashed UFO with a dying alien inside that something finally clicked. It was weird and dangerous and dark enough to capture my fancy and, at twelve years old, it was the first book I read (and finished) by myself. (Thank you, K.A Applegate for Animorphs).

 Books… books were a wonder. My imagination, which had always been so potent, which was full of elaborate stories and characters, was exactly like the pages in front of me. What I had taken to be a monster was actually magic. What I had taken to be walls were actually windows. What I had taken to be dead-ends were actually doors.

 I stepped through and never looked back. My own comic strips, where I told the stories spilling out of me, took the tentative, transformative steps into what would become a life-long love affair: words.

 This I owe entirely to my loving, brilliant, warrior mum.”

“My mother is a survivor. I won’t tell her story here, because it’s hers. But it shaped me in innumerable ways, as generational trauma is wont to do. What I will say is that she broke the cycle, and I am incredibly proud of her for doing so. My earliest memories of her involve books, a mahogany desk that I covered with Tipp-ex (I am so, SO sorry, mum), and late nights under that desk while she studied by the light of a single lamp. I covered the underside of that desk in countless Post-It notes with my little drawings, telling myself stories until I fell asleep.

No matter where we moved, no matter how far we ran, mum always had her books. In a changing, tumultuous childhood, they were precious, vital, constant. I remember her reading stories to me when I fell asleep. Black Beauty comes to mind. Stories infused everything around us and became a way to survive and thrive. Because no matter what was happening out there, my inner world was safe and vibrant.”

“When we moved to the UK in my twelfth year, we inherited the possessions of a lady who had died in our furnished rented property—a house I now call the Crow House. She left behind tins of food (here I discovered Horlicks), clothing (I was very fond of a particularly bulky coat and pair of fleece-lined boots), ornaments (including a rather perplexing collection of keys), and books. Some of the books dated to the 19th century, and others were more modern. I discovered in this collection a book that would, some four years later, become my favourite, a book that would connect with me like a soul mate, and which I would form the habit of reading every year for the next twenty years (which is now, as I write this). I didn’t know the lady who died in the Crow House, but I know she loved that already-well-read book as much as I do. In that way, we’re connected. Stories connect us all.”

 “I’ve always been fascinated by houses. Maybe it’s because I lived in so many. Maybe it’s because I could never trust that we would stay in one for very long. Much of my childhood was spent running, moving, leaving-behind. I remember passing houses as we drove late at night and wondering about the people living inside those warm, orange-lit windows. I was fascinated and confounded by tales of people living in one house their entire lives, sometimes for generation upon generation. I was fascinated too, by the idea that a place, a home, could be haunted by the people inside, in the way I felt the old lady haunting the corridors of the Crow House. The physicality of the houses—dormers, gables, slate roof-tiles, door knockers—tattooed themselves onto my imagination.

The fascination of the house as a construct in my imagination eventually became an integral part of my debut novel, The Dead House, where Kaitlyn must navigate the nebulous and ever-shifting house in her mind to find her missing sister. The idea of the house being tied to memory and how we haunt the spaces we inhabit became the focus of my second novel, And the Trees Crept In. How generational trauma and the actions we commit within the walls of the places we dwell can infect those places like rot became a theme within my third novel, Teeth in the Mist.”

LITERARY AGENT:

Victoria Marini of the High Line Literary Collective

PUBLISHERS:

Little, Brown Books For Young Readers (Hachette)

Orion Books (Hachette)

Graydon House (Harper Collins)

Thomas & Mercer (APub)

Dawn has a currently inactive youtube channel and can be found hanging around Threads and Instagram.