Gabrielle Kimm is the author of three historical novels. The first His Last Duchess (Sphere, 2010) is set in 16th-century Italy and was inspired by Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’; it explores the ill-fated marriage of the fifth duke of Ferrara. A secondary character from that story (originally the duke’s mistress, now a troubled courtesan in Naples) takes centre-stage in Kimm’s second novel The Courtesan’s Lover (Sphere, 2011). In her third book The Girl with the Painted Face (Sphere, 2013) an anarchic troupe of travelling commedia dell’arte actors are unjustly accused of murder.
Gabrielle Kimm is a graduate of the MA course in creative writing at the University of Chichester, a course on which she now occasionally works as an associate lecturer. Her magic-realist short story, ‘Kite’, written on the MA, won the City of Derby short-story competition in 2009. Gabrielle Kimm still works regularly with a writing group made up of fellow MA graduates. She has also been a secondary-school teacher of English and drama for more than 20 years. She currently teaches part-time at a small performing-arts school in Chichester.
Gabrielle Kimm lives in rural west Sussex with her two teenage daughters and an elderly Lakeland terrier. For her next project, she is researching a particularly scandalous decade in the reign of Louis XIV of France.
