Caroline Smailes

Dr Caroline Smailes is a novelist, academic and editor. Her acclaimed debut novel, In Search of Adam, was published in 2007 (The Friday Project/HarperCollins). The Big Issue North declared the book ‘an engrossing and touching read from a new talent’. Since then Caroline has written four additional novels and co-authored a short-story collection. These include Black Boxes, international bestseller Like Bees to Honey, a modern-day fairy tale The Drowning of Arthur Braxton and an experimental digital novel with eleven endings, 99 Reasons Why (all HarperCollins). The latter caused the Observer to declare, ‘Caroline Smailes and Will Self are arch-experimentalists.’

The British feature film of The Drowning of Arthur Braxton was funded after a successful Kickstarter campaign by director Luke Cutforth and starred Johnny Vegas as Arthur Braxton Snr.

Caroline has worked in creative writing for the last decade as director of book editing at BubbleCow, as a mentor for writers and as an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. Passionate about discussing creative practice, she has chaired numerous author interviews in literary festivals, libraries and bookshops around the UK and overseas. Her new project is a novel based on the life of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and her latest academic research is a critical exploration of the ways in which women involved in creative pursuits, such as the visual arts, have disappeared from historical narratives. She is also known as Caroline Wallace (The Finding of Martha Lost).