Felicity Goodall

Felicity has been fascinated by outsiders ever since she saw prisoners’ graffiti at the Tower of London when she was five. She spent a large part of her childhood in fancy dress on a hobby horse she made from a bamboo cane and an old sock. Armed with a wooden sword and cardboard shield she went off on quests inspired by the stories told by her soldier-father. At eight she wrote her first book, complete with ISBN and endorsement - as yet unpublished.

Unwilling to be coralled into a conventional career as a teacher, she trained as a journalist. Her career took her to Oslo as a freelance foreign correspondent, covering the Nordic region for print and broadcast media including The Sunday Times, International Herald Tribune and Business Week. She also worked in television and is a former BBC Radio 4 producer, making historical documentaries and producing programmes such as A Good Read and Poetry Please!

It was when she interviewed conscientious objectors for two BBC documentaries, that Felicity developed a fascination for the extraordinary stories of ordinary people caught in the slipstream of war. She is the author of five books including Exodus Burma: the British Escape through the Jungles of Death 1942, and We Will not Go to War, both published by The History Press. Her play about Mea Allan, Change of Heart, was one of a trilogy of plays about women journalists for BBC Radio 4. She lives in Devon but likes nothing better than time-travelling in archives and libraries searching for voices brushed into the margins of history.

‘If your knowledge of history from school is one part half-remembered battles, two parts best-forgotten reigns and three parts dull, dull, dull, take a lesson with Felicity Goodall. She paints a picture of the past that’s not deadly grey but living colour, and an assault on more than the visual sense. She has a nose for a story’ – Plymouth Live.