Credit: True North Studio, Leeds
Karen powell
Agent: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: Karen grew up in Rochester, Kent. She left school at sixteen but returned to education in her mid-twenties, reading English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. Karen lives with her family in York.
Her novel, THE RIVER WITHIN, has been published by Europa in the USA and UK (2020) and Edizioni E/O in Italy. The novel has been described as ‘Consistently elegant and absorbing, THE RIVER WITHIN is a supremely accomplished first work… This is a novel whose shimmering surface conceals hidden depths.’ – Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Karen Powell’s most recent novel, FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS, was published by Europa in 2023 and was shortlisted for the inaugural Nero Book Award for Fiction.
FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS
Literary fiction, 288 pages, Europa Editions, 2023
1842. Stubborn, free-spirited Emily Brontë would like to stay at home forever, but her sister Charlotte has other ideas.
FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS is an evocative and affecting novel that explores themes including the power of the imagination, liberty — physical, sexual, spiritual, imaginative — sisterhood, the pull of home, and the power of nature.
THE RIVER WITHIN
Literary fiction, 320 pages, Europa Editions, July 2020
Set in North Yorkshire in the 1950s, THE RIVER WITHIN is a piercingly evocative literary novel centred around the lives of two women.
On a summer’s day in 1955, in the village of Starome, the drowned body of young Danny Masters is discovered by three of his teenage friends: Alexander, the volatile heir to Richmond Hall, the country estate that neighbours Starome, and sister and brother, Lennie and Tom, whose father is land agent to the Richmond family.
How did Danny Masters die?
‘Child of nature’ Lennie is in love with volatile Alexander, but is he in love with her or merely playing with her? Alexander’s mother Venetia has been a widow for less than a year, and yet her husband’s brother seems always to be by her side.
In an interweaving narrative that moves across the months before and after Danny’s death, village secrets gradually come to the surface.