Rebecca Jenkins

Rebecca Jenkins is a cultural historian and novelist living in Teesdale, County Durham. Her writing evolved from a passion for the voices discovered in diaries and journals collected from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but her interests embrace the power of graphics, film and modern media. A member of both the International Society of Olympic Historians and the Crime Writers’ Association, her non-fiction work includes a biography of the 19th-century actress Fanny Kemble The Reluctant Celebrity (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and The First London Olympics 1908 (Piatkus/Little Brown, 2008). She has published two novels featuring the Regency detective F.R. Jarrett (Quercus 2009, 2011) and two other crime novels. She has won several northern writing awards for novels and screenwriting and is an alumnus of the BBC TV scriptwriting programme, Northern Voices.

A long-time writing partner of her father, David Jenkins (Bishop of Durham 1984–94), Rebecca began her working life handling media relations during the turbulent Thatcher years. Her collaborations with David Jenkins include the theological autobiographies Free to Believe and Calling of a Cuckoo, the economic commentary Market Whys and Human Wherefores, and a short play directed by Max Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Rebecca lectures and leads creative-writing workshops. She is also a book doctor, a writing mentor and a regular contributor to the Battle of Ideas in London. In recent years she has been working with people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and their carers.