Independent Bookshop Week is coming up in June with seven events held over the seven days at different indie bookshops across York.
The week, which runs from 14th of June to 21st June, includes an evening in conversation with authors Angharad Hampshire, L.K. Pang and Helen Smith at The Blue House Bookshop.
We spoke to Angharad Hampshire about the event and her book The Mare.
She said: “I will be doing a Q&A about The Mare during Independent Bookshop Week. Independent bookshops are so, so important for the literary landscape of the UK. The Blue House bookshop is one of my favourites and worthy of local (and national!) support.”
The Mare is a historical, biographical fiction based on the true story of Hermine Braunsteiner, one of the few thousand women who worked as a female concentration camp guard. She was the first person to be extradited from the United States for Nazi war crimes. Her American husband, Russell Ryan never knew of her life during the war before her story was exposed to the public in 1964 by the New York Times.
Angharad Hampshire wrote The Mare as part of a Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. When asked what made her want to write about Braunsteiner, she responded: “I read about Hermine Braunsteiner in the New York Times in 2015. So many elements of her story fascinated me. I couldn’t stop thinking about her story and the moral complexity that surrounds it.
“Barely a month later, I read a quote by the brilliant African American writer Toni Morrison: ‘If there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ I took that as a sign and started to research the book.”
As a former journalist, Hampshire felt her experience helped in writing a novel: “I’m not sure I could have written it without the skills journalism has given me: attention to detail, obsession with fact, the ability to structure a multi-faceted story. Being an ex-journalist also helped me to market the book.
“It’s been a steep learning curve, but one I did have some knowledge of having been on the other side of the fence, so to speak.”
Hampshire chose to tell Braunsteiner and Ryan’s story as fiction rather than non-fiction for a number of reasons: “I have written a lot of non-fiction journalism but had wanted to write a novel for quite some time. This story spoke to me in a way that told me to write it. Second, despite having done extensive research on female camp guards, Hermine Braunsteiner and the time period, there are a lot of things about Hermine and Russell that we can never know, so it made more sense to write it as fiction.
“Also while it is about Hermine and Russell and their combined stories, it is also about broader socio-political questions and themes that resonate today – I felt that these were better explored in fiction. Finally, I think fiction often has a broader reach than non-fiction.”
The Mare was published in September 2024 and has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025. We asked if she will be writing another historical or biographical fiction: “Yes, I have plans for two more at the moment, but nothing at all to do with Nazism! I am also extremely interested in form, particularly poetry and fractured writing, so I suspect I will branch out beyond historical fiction at some point.”
Find out more here about the upcoming event in Independent Bookshop Week.
Photo credit: Charlotte Brandis photography
