Beatrice Parvin

Beatrice Parvin has spent her time, ever since she can remember, creating stories. She is a committed daydreamer and a believer that writing the past questions the present. How buildings hold memory, our relationship to space and time and the influence of ancestors, conscious and unconscious, inspire her writing. She read English and History of Art at Goldsmiths College. Her BA focused on the connection between word and image. This study gave her the opportunity in which to examine interdisciplinary art form and the relationship between creativity and culture. Whilst there, she began studying North African and Middle Eastern dance. On completion of her BA she performed regularly with Balkan and Turkish maestros, Mukka, and London's leading exponents of North African music El Andaluz, at arts centres, festivals, and events nationally and internationally. Later she read Creative Writing at Kingston University. She became fascinated by the study of language, narratives and archetypes found in British folk song. These elements form the basis of her first novel Captain Swing and the Blacksmith. The inaccessible ruined village of Imber became an inspiration and the setting for the story. Yet, the poetry of the songs guided the texture and sound quality of the language. The book has an accompanying soundtrack of new and traditional songs. The title track encapsulates the narrative in verse form, thus returning the novel to lyric form. In 2015, she graduated with distinction from the MFA course in Creative Writing. Captain Swing and the Blacksmith was published in 2017. She is presently writing her second historical novel The Handsel Sisters, based on a Wiltshire legend.