AUTHOR PROFILE

Ajay Close

Ajay Close is a Scottish-based dramatist and writer of literary fiction whose novels explore the emotional flashpoints of place, politics and family. Her first, Official and Doubtful, was published to rave reviews and long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her third novel, Trust (2014), is published by Blackfriars, the digital imprint of Little, Brown UK – and in paperback by Tippermuir,  Scotland. The Keekin Gless, her play about Scots poet William Soutar, premiered at Perth Theatre in July 2009. The Sma Room Seance, a musical play, toured Scotland in 2012 and is being revived at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe.

Ajay's first career was in journalism, where she won many awards. 

Website and social media: www.ajayclose.co.uk

twitter: @AjayClose

Facebook: Ajay Close

Bibliography

Official and Doubtful (Secker & Warburg, 1996);

Forspoken (Secker & Warburg, 1998);

Trust (Blackfriars ebook (Little, Brown); Tippermuir Scottish paperback edition, 2014)

Ajay Close on Amazon

Links to ebooks: http://www.blackfriarsbooks.com/book/trust/

Synopses of books:
Official and Doubtful is a psychological thriller about a woman who kills her husband and goes on the run. ('Brave, vulnerable, intensely observant and articulate, packed with life,' John le Carré;  'Ajay Close is brilliant,' Fay Weldon.)

Forspoken features the daughter of a 1960s countercultural psychiatrist who comes to believe she has been cursed. ('A rare gift of combining tartness and empathy, intellectual reach and an up-to-speed take on contemporary madness,' Candia McWilliam.)

Trust, a novel about women, men, love and money, follows a group of characters over three decades from the miners' strike to the aftermath of the recent banking crisis.

England, 1984. Margaret Thatcher is in Downing Street, the miners are on strike and the bankers of Goodison Farebrother are making money. Lexa, Gabriel and Rae are unlikely allies, but how else are they to survive as women in a male-dominated bank? When Goodisons brokers the sale of a privately-owned coal mine, they find themselves caught between the sexual war of attrition in the office and the pitched battles on the picket-line. And violence, they discover, can be contagious.

Scotland, 2006. The three women are no longer colleagues but still friends. The intensity of the 1980s is a distant memory. Then comes the banking crisis, and the return of a face from the past with shocking news. Lexa must deal with the fallout from the choices she made in her idealistic twenties. But do the people she wants to protect deserve her protection – and at what price?  ('A serious book for grown-ups who want the world taken not with a pinch of salt but with something a little stronger,' Scotsman)

Pitch to Festival Organisers:

 My latest novel, Trust – a page-turning story  about women's friendship, and a state-of-Britain novel with trenchant things to say about politics and sexual politics – draws on on inside knowledge from friends in the banking industry and scenes I witnessed as a reporter during the miners' strike. With the UK still suffering from the banking crisis, and feminism newly resurgent, it is a highly topical novel.

I'm told I am an unusually-compelling reader of my own work, and am often asked if I trained as an actor.

Awards & Prizes: longlisted for Orange Prize 1996; many journalism awards

Literary Festival Appearances: Edinburgh Book Festival,Aye Write! (Glasgow), Winter Words (Pitlochry), Paisley Book Festival,Castlemilk Book Festival, Fringe by the Sea (North Berwick), Huntly Book Festival,
Contact email: [closeajay[@]gmail.com] - remove brackets from email address
Contact telephone ? 01738 638851