Joan Barbara Simon

Joan Barbara Simon writes literary fiction that explores culture, identity and desire.

She lives in a former vicarage with three dogs, an uninvited mouse called Susie, and a legacy of shelves stacked with an improbable mixture of bibles, hymnbooks and sex-education manuals — an appropriate introduction to the contradictions that make life interesting. In her fiction, she questions the labels we inherit. She likes nothing more than to give such labels all a good threshing and to surprise you with what they yield. Ultimately, people are rarely just one thing—and neither are the stories worth telling.

If you like fiction that crosses boundaries, challenges assumptions and raises an eyebrow, you will feel quite at home in her novels.