Many years ago, I used to visit a village called North Berwick on the east coast of Scotland. On the surface it looked picturesque and affluent with its stone cottages sandwiched among stately Victorian villas. But that tranquil exterior masked a tragic history. One of the largest witch trials to take place in Scotland, the infamous 'North Berwick Witch Trials', unfolded here in the early 1590s. In this small pocket of land, somewhere between 70 and 200 souls were condemned and executed for witchcraft. For years I’d wanted to give voice to those only known through their brutal torture and deaths: Agnes Sampson, the midwife and healer; Gellis Duncan, a young serving lass with a gift for healing; and John Fian, a schoolmaster condemned as the ringleader. Through my novel, I imagined how they must have lived, their hopes, their daily struggles, and their incomprehension as the torrent of accusations swirled around them. Yet I also strived to capture the resilience of the human spirit and hope for the future. To them, Paris would have seemed a beacon of refinement, culture and sophistication. By stepping in their footsteps, I began to envisage another healer, one of privilege and learning. Assen, whose family hailed from the Saadi Sultanate (Morocco), embraces the promise of new chemical medicines in France. But his zeal blinds him to its limitations. Its arrogance in sweeping aside the benefits of earlier healing traditions and potentially recasting people as powerless patients. In weaving these stories together, I saw shadows from our own time, the anxieties about modern pandemics, the loss of trust in progress and our efforts to preserve human dignity. The resonance between past and present, I hope comes through in my debut novel, The Doctor, the Witch and the Rose Stone.
I am currently a qualitative researcher in medical research and I have a PhD in medical sociology and a degree in History. Until now, all of my writing has been non-fiction, published in academic journals or independently.
