Alice McVeigh

Prizewinning Austenesque author, who started career with "big-five" publisher Orion in contemporary fiction. Her novels have placed in Publishers Weekly's BOOKLIFE prize, and won gold medals in the Pencraft, Global, eLit, Incipere and Historical Fiction Company book awards. They have been finalists for the Foreword Indie "Book of the Year" and finalists in the International, Cygnus, Goethe and Chatelaine Book Awards, editors' picks at Publishers Weekly and won Kirkus stars.

Biography

Alice McVeigh was born in South Korea, of American diplomatic parents, and lived in Asia until she was 13, when the family returned to Washington D.C. She then fell in love with the cello. After achieving a B.Mus. with distinction at the internationally acclaimed Jacobs School of Music, she came to London to study with Jacqueline du Pré and William Pleeth. Since then, she has performed with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique all over Europe, America and Asia.

Her first two contemporary novels – While the Music Lasts and Ghost Music – were published by Orion Publishing/Hachette, and her first play (Beating Time) put on at the Lewisham Theatre. (The film rights to her first book were also sold, to Channel 4, but Mozart in the Jungle got there first!) As well as performing, Last Star Standing was published by Unbound Publishing under her pen name, Spaulding Taylor, on February 18, 2021. (Kirkus-starred, US Review of Books recommended, finalist in the Wishing Shelf book awards in adult fiction.)

More recently she has written three multi-prizewinning books in the style of Jane Austen: SUSAN, HARRIET and DARCY.

Alice is married to Professor Simon McVeigh, and lives in London. They have one daughter, who will next month take up a Presidential scholarship at Harvard, and a second home in Crete. Apart from music and fiction, Alice’s is most addicted to tennis. She is a powerful but notably inaccurate tennis player, with the dubious distinction of being the perpetual ladies’ singles runner-up at the - very, very - local tennis club.