Elizabeth Brophy

Find Elizabeth Brophy
on table number 24
at the summer
Oxford Indie Book Fair
on 13-July 2025

See home page for details, map and more.

I feel like I’ve always been reading and writing. I know that’s not actually true, but it feels like that is what I’ve done for my whole life; from reading Spot goes to France and writing my first story (about a fox), through to getting a DPhil in Classical Archaeology, all the way to now with a supportive writing group and a self-published book to show for it.

For me, it’s about writing what’s in my head. There are some scenes, conversations, and characters that are so strong they must be put down on paper. Sometimes doing this means they slip away, but sometimes it makes them stronger, leads to another scene, another event, more words pouring onto the page. That’s how I started writing my book, Helena; there was a first sentence that went round and round my head for a few years – ‘How does a woman give birth to an egg?’ – and one night, I had to get out of bed and write that down. What came next changed a lot over the years I spent writing it, everything from the format to the font, but the sentence that kicked it off remains.

This can make it hard when you’ve got a bunch of scenes in your mind’s eye – which one is ready to come out? All I can do is write them and see where they decide to take me. And who knows? Just because it didn’t go anywhere right now, doesn’t mean it won’t go somewhere one day.

I also ascribe to that line from the great Toni Morrison – ‘if there’s a book you want to read that hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it’. So that’s also what I try to do, write what I want to read. And hopefully someone else does too.