Stroud's Authors and Poets

The Stroud landscape has been a muse for artists for generations - from Laurie Lee to present day painters.

Jamila Gavin

Jamila Gavin signs Coram Boy at Stroud Children's Book Shop (© 2001 Alexander Caminada)

Children's author and winner of Whitbread's Children's Book of the Year Award 2001 was born in India. She is half Indian and many of her stories are multi-cultural. She has lived in the Stroud area for the past 25 years and has been writing children's books for the last 15. These have been very successful as has been shown by her recent successes with Coram Boy. This is set in 18th century Gloucester and London, and tells the tale of Toby, saved from an African slave ship and Aaron, the illegitimate son of the heir to a great estate.
'It was an opportunity to write about my interest in history and music,' she said.
She has also written a highly successful trilogy about an Indian brother and sister separated from their mother and home, set against a background of the Indian fight for independence. These are The Wheel of Surya, The Eye of the Horse and Track of the Wind. In addition to her novels Jamila Gavin has written a play, lots of short stories and tours the country talking to children. 'But most of all I am glad to be able to write and be published,' she said.

Katie Fforde

Katie Fforde - Novelist.

Novelist Katie Fforde has lived in Stroud for the past 15 years and has been writing for about the last 10, starting with an attempt at a Mills & Boon romance and, by her own admission, failing miserably. She says she then tried to give up writing but met, almost by accident, a literary agent through the Romantic Novelists Association, and was encouraged, at the age of 32, to write, not to order this time, but in the way she wanted to.
Living Dangerously, which she describes as a cross between a comedy of manners and a light romance, was the result and was immediately a huge success. Based in a fictional Stroud, she captures many of the characteristics of the town. 'I am very fond of the town,' she said. 'It has lots of new ideas and a lot of very different people live here. You can have a huge range of friends without having to even get in the car. I like Stroud because it's stubborn, with a touch of the Anarchist about it. We won't let our old buildings be pulled down because they're not pretty. Before we moved here I read in the Stroud News and Journal about people camping out on the top of shoeshops. And thank goodness they did. We're proud of our working classness and are in no danger of being mistaken for Painswick.
Her second novel, The Rose Revived, is about three cleaning ladies living on a narrowboat. Her later novels involve gardening (Wild Designs and Thyme Out), cooking (Thyme Out), running a hotel boat (Life Skills) and saving a manor house (Stately Pursuits), all interspersed with her light humour and compelling romances.

Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper lives in Bisley near Stroud.

Author, journalist and broadcaster Jilly Cooper's first job was as a cub reporter for the Middlesex Independent 'in darkest Brentford', from 1957 to 1959. After that, she says, she was sacked from 22 jobs until, after much badgering of national newspaper editors, she became a columnist for the Sunday Times in 1969.
In 1982 she left the Sunday Times, joined the Mail on Sunday and, coincidentally, moved to a village near Stroud. Originally, she says, she and her husband Leo were looking for a house in the Oxford area but while staying for the weekend at Longleat were told about the house in Bisley. 'Leo went to see it and fell in love with it. Then I went to see it and fell in love with it and we have been here ever since.'
She says people are very rude about Stroud but she loves it. 'It has some glorious buildings,' she said, adding that the Stroud area has provided 90 per cent of the inspiration for her novels, which are all set in the fictional county of Rutshire, which is really Gloucestershire.
The huge success of her first novel Riders, published in 1985 and reaching number one in the best sellers list in its first week, was entirely due, she says, to her move to Bisley. 'I was trying to write Riders in London and failing miserably, because it was set in the country. Then there was the fact that we were so broke that the bank said we would have to sell our lovely house here. It was quite and incentive to write better and more quickly,' she said.
She went on to write the blockbusters Rivals and Polo, and then Appassionata about an orchestra, set in the west country and including many references to Stroud. Other novels include The Man who Made Husbands Jealous and Score!. As well as the best sellers Jilly Cooper has written countless popular non-fiction books, including Women and Superwomen (1974), How to Survive Christmas (1986) and The Common Years (1982) about her dog walking exploits on the commons of south west London. She has also written a series of romantic novels and many children's books.

Rev Wilbert Awdry

Thomas The Tank Engine stained glass window.

The Rev Wilbert Awdry, creator of the Thomas the Tank Engine Books, which he refers to as the Railway Series, never set out to be an author. He merely told stories to amuse his son and was astonished by how successful they became. The first was published in May 1945 and have been best sellers ever since. He wrote 26 books with four stories in each, the last of which was written in 1972.
'I gave up because I had exhausted the imagination and I wasn't going to carry on for the sake of it and produce something sub-standard,' he said. 'In 1984 my son started writing stories along similar lines for his young son and has since taken over from me.'
As well as his interest in railways the Rev Awdry was a member of the Gloucestershire Society of Industrial Archaeology for which, in 1973, he edited a gazetteer of industrial sites in the county.
He and his wife moved to Stroud in 1966. He was very fond of the area and said it was a very good place to retire to. The Rev Awdry died in 1997 aged 85.
In Rodborough Parish Church, Stroud, there is a stained glass window of Thomas the Tank Engine as a memorial to the author.

Sue Limb
Comic novelist Sue Limb has lived in and around Stroud since 1984, having been introduced to the area when her parents retired to Woodchester in 1970. 'I used to go through Stroud on the train as a child and think what an interesting town it looked,' she said. 'I still think that, and now that I live here I find it is a very congenial place.'
She started her working career as a teacher in a comprehensive in Cambridge but says she was not tough enough for the job and took up journalism instead, initially writing feature articles for the teenage magazine Jackie. 'I wanted to write for teenagers because I'd been working with tem and knew about their fears, their worries and their concerns.'
Then came her first novel, Up The Garden Path, which received great critical acclaim as 'a hilarious romp' and was quickly taken up for television and radio. A serious biography of Captain Oates followed before her second novel, Love 40, about a woman who was coming to live in the Stroud valleys.
'I was following the old adage "Stick to what you know",' she said.
Since then there have been a series of books, articles for Good Housekeeping magazine and a weekly column, Dulcie Domum's Bad Housekeeping for the Guardian. 'It is about a fictional household. I don't think I could do it every week if it wasn't fictional,' she said.
Other books include Passionfruit, a historical novel set on a slave plantation in the West Indies, and a number of novels for teenagers.

W H Davies

W. H. Davies - Poet.

Poet W H Davies became so fond of the area visiting his friend portrait painter William Rothenstein, that in 1931 he moved here and lived in and around Nailsworth until his death in 1940.
Davies is probably best remembered for his prose work Autobiography of a SuperTramp, but he was foremost a poet and it is to him that we owe the immortal lines:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare ...