The author
Karen Lewis
I write character-driven stories about people being people: flawed, learning, evolving. The time and the setting might change. People don’t.
My debut novel, The Garnet Inheritance, began with a single paragraph in Asser’s ninth-century Life of Alfred. Osburh – mother of Alfred the Great, wife of King Aethelwulf of Wessex – is described as a woman of religion and learning who taught her children to read. That’s almost everything history preserved. The novel asks what the rest of her life might have looked like: the cost of it, the texture of it, the choices made in the spaces Asser didn’t think to document.
I live on the Isle of Wight, which is the landscape at the heart of The Garnet Inheritance – the chalk downs, the Solent, the particular quality of light over the island’s white cliffs. The island has been overlooked for most of its history, absorbed and renamed and filed away. There is something in that quality – stubbornness beneath apparent compliance – that runs through everything I write.
I start with a person, and build their character the way we come to know anyone: one piece at a time. Not in order. Sometimes in context, often through excavation and discovery. The settings change, from a ninth-century court to a West Virginia winter. The way a person comes into focus doesn’t.
I publish under my own imprint, Little Dog Books.
Short biography – for press use
Karen Lewis is a literary fiction author based on the Isle of Wight. Her debut novel, The Garnet Inheritance, reimagines Osburh – the mother of Alfred the Great – as the architect of a legacy that shaped England. She publishes under her own imprint, Little Dog Books. Her wider work spans contemporary America, imperial China, South East Asia, and places that exist only in the telling. Stories worth finding.
This biography may be reproduced for press purposes. For interviews and further information, please use the contact form.
Karen Lewis
Isle of Wight, England
The imprint
Little Dog Books
Little Dog Books publishes literary fiction about ordinary people doing their best. Whether the setting is a ninth-century court or a West Virginia winter, the people are recognisably us: flawed, coping, occasionally rising to something.
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Stories worth finding.
Little Dog Books
Stories worth finding
littledogbooks.co.uk