Sarah Smith is the second Writer in Residence of 2024 to give a talk at the Library. She will arrive at Gladstone’s Library next month. During her talk, Writing Deaf History, she will discuss Hear No Evil, her novel about a 19th Century court case centring on Jean Campbell, a Deaf woman accused of dropping a child into the river Clyde in Glasgow.
Sarah’s talk will cover the task of researching and fictionalising a true story, the ways she sought to explore Deaf lives in the early 1800s, the practice of drawing on her experiences of working alongside Deaf people to represent an often-misunderstood culture, and the methods she used to portray the visual nature of British Sign Language through written text.
The insights she shared during this brief interview were genuinely fascinating, but sharing them here could spoil her talk, so instead we asked Sarah about the long road to the publication of her first novel and what the residency will mean to her.
She said, “I’ve always written. I loved English at school, read widely and I went to University to study English in the mid-1980s. I originally trained as an English teacher but through a series of life events I fell into working for a range of projects which were all about supporting Disabled people moving into education and employment.
“While I was doing all of that, having a family and earning a salary, I was still writing in my spare time. In my 20s and 30s I thought I wanted to be a poet, then round about the 2000s, I went back to do some creative writing classes at Strathclyde and Glasgow universities and started writing short stories and flash fiction and experimenting with different ways of finding my voice.”
By 2010 Sarah had a few short pieces published and she had been given a tantalising glimpse into the story that would become Hear No Evil.
She said: “I stumbled across the Jean Campbell case when I was working at Deaf Connections and learning BSL (British Sign Language). There was a man called Robert J Smith in my class who was a retired history teacher who had lost his hearing. I was fascinated by some of the books he had put together from the Deaf Connections archives. He’d mentioned the Jean Campbell case in one of his first books and pointed me in the direction of a couple of news articles about the trial.
“I had already written a kid’s book about dinosaur eggs being discovered in Partick in Glasgow, and that was longlisted for the Chickenhouse/Times children’s book award. I didn’t get any further with it – I didn’t really know how to go about getting help with publishing it and found that quite demoralising – but the judges gave me great feedback. I had a two-thirds finished chick lit novel, too, about a group of mothers who meet at an ante-natal class, but that wasn’t really working for me either.
“It took me a long time to work out that writing is one thing and publishing is another. Even when writing is difficult and challenging, it’s yours and you can direct it, but getting something published is down to somebody else.
“It made more sense for me to do an MLitt and keep writing other projects – it doesn’t always help to put all your dinosaur eggs in one basket! The course was amazing because it gave me the space to workshop the experimental stuff I’d written and talk to people who would tell me the truth and give me ideas about where to go with it – and I’ll talk about that during the evening talk…”
Sarah completed the meat of Hear No Evil with the support of her tutors and peers on the course. As Sarah was now working with a clearer idea of who to approach, the book was picked up and published by the Two Roads imprint of John Murray Press. It was shortlisted for a clutch of awards; the Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger 2023, the Bloody Scotland Debut 2022, and the Historical Writers Association Debut Crown 2022 and received acclaim among Deaf community circles.
Sarah has no issue with her book being described as either a historical novel or as crime fiction.
She said: “I felt my writing improved hugely when I stopped trying to write within a particular genre or write towards publication. I also credit writers like Kate Atkinson who has been a big influence on me. She writes about real people with depth – her stories are not slight, there’s something to them – and Kate is probably a stronger influence on my writing now, particularly as Hear No Evil has a crime element to it and I really enjoy her Jackson Brodie series. I love detective fiction, particularly Tartan Noir like Ian Rankin and Glasgow writer, Denise Mina. So it’s always made sense to me to combine history and crime.”
So what’s next?
“The immediate thing I am working on is the difficult novel number two. I’m really jealous of those debut novelists who already have three more books ready because I didn’t!” said Sarah. “For now, I’m working on redrafting my current novel, working title The Cheap Seats, which is set in Glasgow in 1920 and centres on characters drawn to a down-at-heel cinema.
“So there’s the practical, get-your-head-down redrafting, but there’s another project on the side, which is the idea I have for book three. It is based on research I did at the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow. I was drawn to archives belonging to a doctor who was a kind of proto-pathologist and went out with the police to cover cases. My husband described him as ‘Quincy but in Victorian Glasgow’. Because that time period is contemporaneous with Gladstone, I thought it would be good to use the collections at the Library to contextualise that. It’s a great opportunity.”
Writing Deaf History takes place on Thursday 11th July, 7-8pm. A BSL interpreter will be present.
View-online tickets are available for £10. In person tickets are available from £15. Dinner and book bundles are available. Click here to find out more about the talk.
Pictures supplied by Sarah Smith