Anna Mazzola

Anna Mazzola is the a writer of historical thrillers and Gothic fiction. Her novels explore the impact of crime and injustice. Her debut novel, The Unseeing, is based on the life of a real woman called Sarah Gale who was convicted of aiding a murder in London in 1837. It won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in the US and was nominated for the Historical Writers’ Association’s Debut Crown in the UK. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is out now. It follows a folklorist’s assistant as she searches out dark fairytales and stolen girls on the Isle of Skye in 1857. The Story Keeper was nominated for the Highland Book Prize. Her third novel, The Clockwork Girl, set in Paris in 1750 and based partly on the story of the vanishing children of Paris, will be published by Orion in March 2022. She is currently working on her fourth novel, a ghost story set in Fascist Italy.

We had a really fun chat with Anna, talking about how she juggles her legal and writing careers, the difficulties of writing stories that span genres and so don't neatly fit into expected categories, why prologues are good and much more! We learn about her next book(s) and talk about why sometimes it is best to get the first draft done and then fix it afterwards.