11 December 2024
Maggie Ritchie will share her love both of writing and art. Her debut book Paris Kiss relates the tragic love affair between Rodin and his muse, Camille Claudel – a story to be recounted in Broughton House under the watchful gaze of two Rodin masterpieces! Daisy Chain was inspired by the ‘Glasgow Girls’ involving Maggie in considerable research, as it is set in Kirkcudbright, then moves to Shanghai in the Roaring Twenties. Maggie will give us an insight to her latest work, which features a female artist, once a student of Joan Eardley and Margot Sandeman, who becomes embroiled with Russian spies.
Maggie Ritchie: biography
Award-winning author and successful freelance journalist, Maggie Ritchie, was born in India and grew up in Zambia, Spain and Venezuela before settling in Glasgow.
For many years she was a journalist writing features for the Scottish and National press. She then studied for an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, graduating with a Distinction.
In 2015 her debut novel Paris Kiss was published for which she won the Curtis Brown Prize, and was the runner-up for the Sceptre and Mslexia First Novel Prizes. It is set in Bohemian Paris in the 1880s and tells the story of Rodin and his scandalous affair with his protege and muse, Camille Claudel.
In 2017 she brought out Looking for Evelyn which was short-listed for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize 2018, and inspired by her childhood in Zambia. It is an atmospheric tale of love, loss and growing up in post-colonial Southern Africa.
A year later Maggie travelled to Shanghai on a Society of Authors grant to undertake research for her next book Daisy Chain, a homage to the ‘Glasgow Girls’, set against the turbulence of the early years of the 20th century. Kirkcudbright, Glasgow, and Shanghai, the city of cabaret culture, provide the settings for an evocative and highly readable novel, now in paperback.
Maggie has appeared at a plethora of library events and book festivals including Wigtown, Glasgow, and Tidelines.