Leigh Verrill-Rhys: Author | Novelist

Fiction

For most of my adult life, I have been writing fiction – my first love. Since September 2007, after decades of completion avoidance, I put aside all my excuses and began to work seriously. Until I realized that "always wanted to be a writer" meant I had to finish the work I had started before I could say, "I am a writer", I had thousands of words on reams of pages.

My second completed novel is Wait a Lonely Lifetime and will be my first published novel, contracted to Avalon Books, New York. This was a work in progress when I spoke to Lia Brown in July 2010. By the end of September, the book was in her hands. You can read about this book, my process in writing it and what happens next in my online writer's journal, Ever Writing. I will also be a guest at Four Foxes One Hound on the 28th of April, please visit anytime to comment. My Facebook page, Leigh Verrill-Rhys, Novelist, will also have details of the publication date, what my editor says about this novel and other information. The publication date for Wait a Lonely Lifetime has been moved up to April 2012.

My first contemporary novel, Salsa Dancing with Pterodactyls, was completed at the end of 2009 and revised in 2010. This novel is a work of the heart, mind and soul – my magnum opus.

My third contemporary novel is called Dance by the Light of the Moon, also a work in progress: aren't all books before they're published?

Anthologies of Women's Autobiography

I have been a Director and Editor for Honno: Welsh Women's Press since 1987. During the same period, I have been an international book distributor and marketing consultant for writers, artists and businesses in Wales.

I began my writing career in San Francisco as a short story writer for several small magazines and the Public Broadcasting Service. Once I had moved to Wales, I concentrated on editing the autobiographical and non-fiction writing of women living in Wales with the publication of On My Life - a collection that won second prize in the Raymond Williams Award for Community Publishing in 1990.

I was given an Arts Council of Wales grant to join the masterclass of the poet, Leslie Norris, at the Hay Festival a short time later. I had been involved with the Writers on Tour scheme of the Arts Council as well as a member of the Undeb Awduron Cymru for several years. When the influential Welsh language writers' union and the Writers' Union of Wales were incorporated into the Academi Gymreig, I became a member of the Academi.

In 1992, I had the privilege of working with the historian, Deirdre Beddoe, on the collection, Parachutes & Petticoats, inspired by my mother's experiences during World War II, a book that has enjoyed several reprints and is available again in a new format since January 2010. And, in 2002, Iancs, Conshîs a Spam was published as the Welsh language companion volume to Parachutes – stories and experiences of Welsh-speaking women in Wales written in their first language, offers a different perspective on the experience of women in war.

These books have found their way into bibliographies in books such as Shelter Me by Alex McAulay, Older Widows And The Life Course: Multiple Narratives Of Hidden Lives (New Perspectives on Ageing and Later Life) by Pat Chambers, The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life by Jeffrey Weeks, Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction (Women's and Gender History) by June Purvis, Ail: Webster's Timeline History, 450 BC - 2007 by Icon Group International among others - about which I am very proud and a little surprised.