About Us
Pilton Publishing Posse
Writers Daniela Soave, Katharine Ritchie and Brigid McConville are three friends who live in or near Pilton, Somerset.
About Brigid
Being bored in childhood; that’s what turned me into a writer. When I wasn’t writing stories I had my nose in a book.
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I blame my parents who had too many children to fit in a car so we were stuck at home. But we must have escaped sometimes because one day I came down from reading in a tree to find the house locked up and my family gone on holiday, so perhaps I am making it up.
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After school where English was my thing, university was four more years of reading stories. (The joke about Trinity College Dublin is they fit three years into four.) Then I found I could actually earn a living by writing and became a journalist. Sometimes my articles grew into non-fiction books; meanwhile my three children grew into grown-ups. When I couldn’t sell an article to a newspaper or magazine I would write it as fiction which was more fun and more money.
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I was always a feminist and it was the stories of women which really fired me up, so I got involved in campaigning for women’s reproductive rights. Women all around the world have amazing stories to tell and it has long been my privilege to be part of that for the White Ribbon Alliance movement.
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All the time my fiction kept on bubbling, and this year it’s been a joy to form the Pilton Publishing Posse with Katherine and Daniela. We are supporting each other to bring our novels into the light.
About Katherine
Katherine ran away from Northern Ireland to join the hippies at 23. She spent five years travelling in India and Australia learning everything from crystal healing to Kinesiology. Finally running out of money she followed a tipi maker to Glastonbury, England and hasn’t left Somerset since. Working at Sunrise Festival for six years as the Press Officer she gained experience writing press releases and social media posts, but continued to hone her skills at the writing she loves best, fiction.
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In September 2019 she opened a small café and herbal apothecary in Shepton Mallet and then Corona Virus hit. The café is now closed but, fatefully, she hopes, this has given her the opportunity to revisit the novel she started last year. Katherine is spending lockdown doing DIY, typing furiously at the keyboard and trying to work out what to do with the rest of her life – no pressure.
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Katherine resides in Somerset with her fourteen-year-old daughter and her husband. She is working on her second novel, the first has been shelved after her search for a publisher ended in vain. She thinks the second book is better. Both books centre around what it was like to grow up in Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles.
About Daniela
This is a picture of a picture of me, aged 17, at my summer job in a fish
factory in the Shetland Isles (I’ve lost the original). I did it to get away from
home. A couple of months later, I was working in Rome at the UN’s Food and
Agricultural Organisation. There was a common thread. Not filleting fish, as it
happened, but editing, translating and cataloguing scientific documents about
– you guessed it – fish. Then it was back to Scotland to university and, after I
decided I didn’t want to be an architect or interior designer, I trained as a
journalist.
Then I moved to London. I spent the next handful of years trailing bands around the globe working for a music paper before I grew up and moved onto magazines and broadsheet newspapers where I spent decades as a writer, commissioning editor and,finally, editorial director. I’ve worked in radio and, briefly, in television, but I’ve always returned to print. It’s in my blood.
A few years ago, however, a move to a rural area coincided with the feeling
that I’d got all I wanted out of journalism and actually journalism probably felt
the same way about me. It’s a different industry from the one I entered as a
cub reporter.
But I can’t stop writing. Now it’s fiction, and it’s a very different skillset from those I learnt as a journalist or the non-fiction books I’ve worked on. So I’m
learning again. And I hope that one day I’ll be good enough to get my novel published, even though the book industry is a difficult nut to crack.
It’s my new adventure.