In the next episode of Imagining the Past, the inaugural winner of the 2020 Elizabeth Jane Corbett Mentorship, Alison D. Stegert, chats with Greg Johnston about her YA novel, Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies.
It is a novel that draws on real-life historical inventions and events, perfect for readers aged 9 and up.
About the book
Winifred Weatherby is no ordinary nineteenth-century girl. She’s unconventional, plucky, and smart. In fact, she’s a girl-genius inventor on a mission to become an engineer, despite the fact that engineering is a Men-Only Zone in 1889.
After being expelled from her progressive academy for promising young ladies, the incorrigible Winifred Weatherby is secretly recruited to be a gadget inventress for Queen Victoria’s league of young lady spies. While aiming to exhibit her Very Promising Invention at the 1889 Paris World Fair, Winnie must protect Queen Victoria from would-be plotters, find her missing father, and prove to the world that girls can be inventors and engineers.
Alison’s debut book had won the Times/Chicken House Institution of Engineering and Technology Prize 2021.
The EJ CORBETT MENTORSHIP CONTEST
In honour of historical novelist, Elizabeth Jane Corbett, the HNSA is offering the chance for a previously unpublished author from Australia or New Zealand to receive a mentorship from Wendy J Dunn to develop a completed first draft of an unpublished historical fiction manuscript for young adults.
key dates
Submissions open: 6 November 2024
Submissions close: 4 December 2024 at 5pm
Winner announced: 12 February 2025
Start polishing your manuscripts!
About the podcast
The Imagining the Past podcast series features authors appearing at the Historical Novel Society Australasia biennial conferences or who have been recognised in our $150,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize.
Our hosts, Kelly Gardiner and Greg Johnston, discuss researching, writing and publishing historical fiction with acclaimed writers of the genre in its many forms from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, set in eras stretching from ancient times to the Swinging Sixties, and for readers of all ages.
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