Dancing with Mr Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen

The Judges

Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire. She has won a Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and was twice shortlisted for the Mail On Sunday / John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Fingersmith and The Night Watch were both shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, and Fingersmith won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith have all been adapted for television. Her latest novel The Little Stranger, was published by Virago in 2009. She lives in London.

Lindsay Ashford is a former BBC journalist and the author of four published crime novels. Her second, Strange Blood, was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. She has had short stories published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and has edited two collections of short fiction and prose for Honno: Written In Blood and Strange Days Indeed. She splits her time between a home on the Welsh coast and Chawton House, where she is a PR consultant.

Mary Hammond started her career writing historical novels for an American book packager in the early 1980s. She is now Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Southampton, specialising in book history, and convenor for Southampton’s MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the print culture of Victorian Britain and has also written on contemporary creative writing.

Rebecca Smith is the five-times great niece of Jane Austen (descended from Jane’s brother Frances, through his daughter Catherine Ann, who was born at Chawton House). She is a Teaching Fellow in Creative Writing at Southampton University. Her first novel, The Bluebird Café, was published by Bloomsbury in 2001. Other novels are Happy Birthday and All That (Bloomsbury 2003) and A Bit Of Earth (Bloomsbury 2006).

Janet Thomas is a freelance editor, living in Aberystwyth. She has edited a wide range of books, including four short-story anthologies for Honno: Catwomen from Hell, The Woman Who Loved Cucumbers, Mirror Mirror and Safe World Gone, which were co-edited with Patricia Duncker. She has published short stories and her children’s picture book Can I Play? (Egmont) won a Practical PreSchool gold award.