10th September 2025
Kim Sherwood is an award-winning novelist and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Kim has taught creative writing in universities, libraries, schools and prisons. Her debut novel explored the legacy of the Holocaust. Her next, the story of a young girl disguised as a boy aboard a smugglers’ ship, in 18th century Devon. Kim is now engaged in writing a trilogy of Double O Novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming estate. Come and find out what it is like to write across the genres.
Biography
Kim Sherwood is a novelist and lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Edinburgh University. In 2018 her award-winning debut novel Testament was released. It explored the legacy of the Holocaust over seventy years through a single family. Testament won the Harper’s Bazaar Big Book of the Year Award and the Bath Novel Award, was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. A year later Kim was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award.
Testament was followed by A Wild & True Relation in 2023, which Dame Hilary Mantel described as “A rarity as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.” Set among the free traders of eighteenth-century Devon, the story follows a young girl disguised as a boy aboard a smuggler’s ship. Woven into her story are the writers – from Celia Fiennes to Hester Thrale to George Eliot – who are transfixed by her myth and who, over three centuries, come together to solve the mystery of her life.
Kim is now engaged in writing a trilogy of Double O Novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming estate. They take the world of Bond and turn it on its head. In Double or Nothing James Bond is missing, but Moneypenny, Head of the Double O Section, hasn’t given up hope of finding him. Meet the new generation of spies… Johanna Harwood, 003; Joseph Dryden, 004; and Sid Bashir, 009. In A Spy Like Me a bomb goes off at the BBC. The country is in chaos, but this is just the start. A global terrorist organisation is plotting a series of deadly attacks. MI6 has just six days’ warning for when the next one will strike. Time is running out….
