Marginalia

Gail Holmes (In the Margins) and Marion Taffe (By Her Hand) bring historical fiction to life through clues left in the margins of old manuscripts.

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GAIL HOLMES grew up in Scotland, the youngest of seven children and the only girl. She graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a BSc (Hons) in Civil Engineering and a Master of Business Administration. She moved to London to join an international energy company and had an international career there for twenty-three years as a project manager and commercial manager. During this time Gail also married and had five children. She moved to Australia in 2013. Her creative writing journey began when she was a working mum with very young children in Shanghai, China. Unable to get back to sleep one night, Gail started writing short stories about living in Shanghai. As this writing habit continued to grow, she attended short courses at the City College of Literature in London and then later studied the Melbourne University’s Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing programme, graduating in 2021.In the Margins is her first novel.

MARION TAFFE is a lifelong daydreamer. She was born in Melbourne, enjoyed a childhood on Magnetic Island in North Queensland and spent her teen years in her family's historic Ballarat home, which was open to the public. She studied Arts at ACU in Ballarat and rowed for Australia in the Under 23 World Championships. Rowing led Marion to a cadetship in journalism and a twenty-year career in media, working at newspapers and magazines in Ballarat, Townsville, Manchester, the Gold Coast and Melbourne, where she was national features and travel editor at mX for eight years. She studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT where she was named Creative Industries Student of the Year in her graduating year of 2023. Marion was runner-up in the Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Prize (non-fiction) in 2022 and a recipient of a Varuna Residential Fellowship in 2023. By Her Hand is a work of remarkable feminist historical fiction about survival, female rage, and writing your own narrative.