Fiona Shaw

Creator Context

Summary

British novelist and academic Fiona Shaw began with the memoir Out of Me, about postnatal breakdown, and has written historical and contemporary fiction including The Sweetest Thing, The Picture She Took, A Stone’s Throw and the Carnegie-nominated young-adult novel Outwalkers. Her fiction repeatedly examines sexuality, female emancipation, women’s constrained social roles, mental health and relationships marginalized by their communities. Tell It to the Bees centers a same-sex relationship between women in a repressive period, while her earlier work also foregrounds working-class women and social prejudice. Shaw teaches creative writing and has held Royal Literary Fund and university fellowships, but there is limited evidence of a prominent activist or partisan public persona; the strongest signal is a recurring literary interest in gender, sexuality and women’s experience.