Monica Kendall

Monica Kendall was born in North London in 1954 to a Polish father and a British mother. In the 1970s, after travelling overland in her gap year to Nepal via Afghanistan, she read Arabic at Oxford University. In summer 1975 she was in Lebanon when the third round of the civil war broke out but managed to return in time to play Dionyza in Shakespeare’s “Pericles”, performed in Sam Wanamaker’s tent on the South Bank, where later he built the Globe. At Oxford she also played Beatrice on a tour to the United States, and Desdemona and the Duchess of Malfi at the Oxford Playhouse.

She went into publishing, did a Masters degree in Medieval Studies at University College London, and reared a son who is a mountaineer and writer. For her edition of Webster’s “The Duchess of Malfi” (2004) she interviewed the director Phyllida Lloyd. Her Welsh/Scottish Jenkins ancestors knew the Brontės in Brussels and Yorkshire, which is the subject of "Lies and the Brontės" (2021). It sheds new light on Charlotte and Emily’s time in Brussels and corrects the many fabrications. In 2023 she published an edition of the first guidebook to North Wales by William Bingley (1804): "North Wales: Intended as a Guide to Future Tourists."

Her first novel was published in April 2025. "Make me thy lyre" is set largely in 1970s Oxford and USA. It is a Bildungsroman with humour, Shakespeare, art, poetry, death and loss.

She has had several poems published in Pennine Platform and Reach Poetry, and was awarded joint second prize in the Edward Thomas Fellowship Poetry Competition 2026 for her poem ‘North Downs Way’. She lives in North Wales.