Hi gang,

I know I’ve not blogged for ages, but have been so embroiled in trying to get my novel finished almost everything else has taken a back seat for the past few months. No wonder novelists tend to oddness – they live in their heads and forget to have a real life! But enough of that!!

This September 10^th we’re celebrating Loose Muse’s 10^th Birthday with an event that includes birthday cake galore…please all of you who are coming, bring a literary-inspired cake to share…it’ll be London’s biggest sugar rush and we’ll all probably be wire to the moon for a fortnight. But cake AND good writing – what’s not to like? We are keen to have cakes decorated in a literary fashion, so if you ice letters onto them or full colour portraits of your favourite icon, its up to you…

We’re not saying you have to create tiny books out of icing, but we’re not not saying that either.

We’ll also be unveiling the beautiful new Loose Muse Banner, especially designed and made by fantastic visual artist Catherine Tuson, who has gifted us her talent as a gesture of solidarity and also because she’s a pretty amazing human being. Now we’ll have something stunning to hang up at Loose Muse events in London and anywhere else I’m able to get to whenever there’s a LM event.

As well as the Loose Muse name and dates, the banner will also display the name of ten iconic women writers, chosen by me and the other members of the Loose Muse Editorial Group. After a lot of thought, between us we chose our Top Ten Women Writers – those women who we all agreed had made extraordinary contributions to world literature through the quality and uniqueness of their writing, often under difficult circumstances. Although the days are long gone when women had to hide behind a male pseudonym so they didn’t bring shame and disrepute on their families, women writers still often don’t get the credit or the recognition they deserve (which is one of the reasons I set up Loose Muse in the first place).

So, who have we included on this list. Well, it was incredibly hard to choose just ten women writers from all those writers who through the centuries have made a genuine and far-reaching contribution to the world’s literature. Our list may or may not be controversial – certainly we hope it will engender discussion as well as inspiring people to put their own lists together and possibly read authors whose work they don’t know.

Our Top Ten Iconics (in no particular order) are:

1. Jane Austen – one of the most widely read writers in the English language.
2. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) – leading Victorian writer and author of seven novels.
3. Charlotte Brontë – whose novels have become classics in English literature.
4. Sappho – the first recognized woman poet.
5. Maya Angelou – one of the most influential and multi-talented African-American writers.
6. Agatha Christie – still one of the world’s best-selling authors.
7. Vera Brittain – outstanding contributor to the literature of WW1.
8. Mary Shelley – novelist and dramatist, best known for her gothic novel ‘Frankenstein’.
9. Margaret Atwood – Canadian poet and novelist, best known for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.
10. J K Rowling – who inspired whole generations of children and adults to read.

We found it so hard to restrict the list to just ten, we’ve also got another ten – numbers 11-20, also all fulfilling the criteria of quality, uniqueness and contribution to world literature…but I’ll write about them in my next blog.

In the meantime come along to the Loose Muse 10^th Birthday celebration event on 10^th September, at the Poetry Society as usual. Features will be me (doing a full set for a change!). Plus the amazing novelist Sally Spedding, who’s coming all the way from Wales to be with us that night.

So come share the passion, share the joy.

Love

Agnes