How Did I Get Here?
The Warsaw Messenger and The Bordeaux Bakery are now available [only] on Amazon and doing pretty well! The Bordeaux Betrayals is due to be published before the end of March.
How did I get here? How did I actually become a published author?
Well, after reading The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah in 2015 I was hooked on historical WW2 fiction. And non fiction too. I knew I'd found my Number one genre.
But I need to go back a little further...
I was brought up in a family who's Grandad had travelled to Egypt in 1914 with the Ist Expeditionary force from New Zealand. He served at Gallipoli and the Western Front and miraculously returned to NZ in May 1919, relatively unscathed except a limp from a schrapnel wound to his hip.
He wasn't a soldier, exactly. Because he played the cornet, he was a member of an important army tradition, the band. They needed a band to play at parades, keep up morale and so on. So he was to be a stretcher bearer, often retrieving the wounded under fire; working in No Man's Land and seeing the most horrific injuries and deaths. He never talked about it.
[I was actually able to take his WW1 diary back to Gallipoli for the 100th Anniversary of the 1915 landings in 2015. It was a privilege.]
My Mum and Dad lived through WW2. I was born 16 years after WW2 ended, and I think the war was still uppermost in their memories. Dad trained to be a pilot later in the war but was not mobilised to Europe, nor the Pacific. A boyfriend of Mum's at the time, was killed in the Pacific. Friends of Dad lost their lives. Everybody knew someone who had been killed. We are a small country after all.
Because of the shortage of men in our towns, due to them fighting [and dying] overseas, the lives of women began to change. My Mum was the first young woman to be allowed to serve on the counter as a teller at the Bank of New Zealand in South Otago, NZ.
So my inspiration and interest in writing about WW2 first of all came from my family.
But as I learnt more about WW2, and read several good non fiction books; Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys by Patrick Bishop, Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre, Das Reich by Max Hastings and Enigma by Robert Harris to mention a few, I decided to read some fictionalised accounts too.
I read Captain Correlli's Mandolin by Louis de Beneierres, and then books by Mark Sullivan, Rhys Bowen, Alan Hlad, Heather Morris, Kate Quinn, Alan Furst and Anthony Doerr, Lee Jackson..... anything good I could get my hands on.
They were wonderful, BUT I realised I hadn't read much specifically about the women in WW2. What did they do? How were they changed? They couldn't join the Armed Forces to fight, but they did take part in the WRENS, the WAAFs, Bletchley Park decoding, working on air-fields, working in radar communication outposts....Women were VERY involved in the war effort.
The Nightingale really opened up my world to the SOE and the women who were sent into Europe behind enemy lines in occupied countries. It also helped me to understand how difficult it was to live under occupation in France [mainly], and how the resistance grew over time. Charlotte Gray, by Sebastian Faulkes was another great novel as well.
The Special Operations Excecutive [a hush hush sabotage and intelligence organisation started by Churchill in 1940], sent thirty nine women into France to be wireless operators or couriers. Some became leaders too.
Fourteen didn't return. How did they get there? Who chose them? What did they do there and how did they survive?
I then read A Life in Secrets and Spy Mistress about Vera Atkins, the 2IC for the head of the SOE French Section who recruited and supervised the women who were sent to France.
Then I read about some of the agents, The White Mouse about Nancy Wake, a very ballsy agent,[born in NZ by the way!], Odette, about agent Odette Samsom, The Spy Who Loved by Clare Mulley, about Krystyna Skarbek, sent to Poland in late 1939.
There were so many young women: Lise de Baissac, Pearl Cornioley, Noor Inyat Khan, Andree Borrell, Denise Bloch, Mary Katherine Herbert, Phyllis Latour........and many more.
These women's lives inspired me. They were so incredibly brave.
Plucked from relatively ordinary lives and plunged into the greatest danger imaginable, where a whisper could betray you any day to the Gestapo. Where you knew the likelihood of you returning to Britain were slim. Where you could spend days alone in a foreign city or village, waiting for messages to code and send to England....and your life expectancy as a wireless operator was only 6 weeks.
Living in a safe country, far away from wars and civil strife, I wonder how many women living in the 21st century Western countries would volunteer to live and work under-cover in occupied Europe during WW2, [if time travel was a thing.] Many women in the 21st century DO live in terribly dangerous countries, Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, parts of South America....Will we hear their stories? Or will we have to wait eighty years to do so?
I wonder if I would volunteer to be an SOE agent? I don't think I would be brave enough; but I guess [and I hope], I'll never find out what I'm capable of.
I hope that my novels do bring some of these women to life, and bring some wonder and inspiration, and appreciation for their courage to my readers lives too!
The books I mention above, both fiction and non-fiction are either sitting on my bookshelves or stored in my kindle! I highly recommend them if you share my interest in this genre.
Watch out for The Bordeaux Betrayals, coming soon!
Kate Duprez
How did I get here? How did I actually become a published author?
Well, after reading The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah in 2015 I was hooked on historical WW2 fiction. And non fiction too. I knew I'd found my Number one genre.
But I need to go back a little further...
I was brought up in a family who's Grandad had travelled to Egypt in 1914 with the Ist Expeditionary force from New Zealand. He served at Gallipoli and the Western Front and miraculously returned to NZ in May 1919, relatively unscathed except a limp from a schrapnel wound to his hip.
He wasn't a soldier, exactly. Because he played the cornet, he was a member of an important army tradition, the band. They needed a band to play at parades, keep up morale and so on. So he was to be a stretcher bearer, often retrieving the wounded under fire; working in No Man's Land and seeing the most horrific injuries and deaths. He never talked about it.
[I was actually able to take his WW1 diary back to Gallipoli for the 100th Anniversary of the 1915 landings in 2015. It was a privilege.]
My Mum and Dad lived through WW2. I was born 16 years after WW2 ended, and I think the war was still uppermost in their memories. Dad trained to be a pilot later in the war but was not mobilised to Europe, nor the Pacific. A boyfriend of Mum's at the time, was killed in the Pacific. Friends of Dad lost their lives. Everybody knew someone who had been killed. We are a small country after all.
Because of the shortage of men in our towns, due to them fighting [and dying] overseas, the lives of women began to change. My Mum was the first young woman to be allowed to serve on the counter as a teller at the Bank of New Zealand in South Otago, NZ.
So my inspiration and interest in writing about WW2 first of all came from my family.
But as I learnt more about WW2, and read several good non fiction books; Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys by Patrick Bishop, Operation Mincemeat by Ben McIntyre, Das Reich by Max Hastings and Enigma by Robert Harris to mention a few, I decided to read some fictionalised accounts too.
I read Captain Correlli's Mandolin by Louis de Beneierres, and then books by Mark Sullivan, Rhys Bowen, Alan Hlad, Heather Morris, Kate Quinn, Alan Furst and Anthony Doerr, Lee Jackson..... anything good I could get my hands on.
They were wonderful, BUT I realised I hadn't read much specifically about the women in WW2. What did they do? How were they changed? They couldn't join the Armed Forces to fight, but they did take part in the WRENS, the WAAFs, Bletchley Park decoding, working on air-fields, working in radar communication outposts....Women were VERY involved in the war effort.
The Nightingale really opened up my world to the SOE and the women who were sent into Europe behind enemy lines in occupied countries. It also helped me to understand how difficult it was to live under occupation in France [mainly], and how the resistance grew over time. Charlotte Gray, by Sebastian Faulkes was another great novel as well.
The Special Operations Excecutive [a hush hush sabotage and intelligence organisation started by Churchill in 1940], sent thirty nine women into France to be wireless operators or couriers. Some became leaders too.
Fourteen didn't return. How did they get there? Who chose them? What did they do there and how did they survive?
I then read A Life in Secrets and Spy Mistress about Vera Atkins, the 2IC for the head of the SOE French Section who recruited and supervised the women who were sent to France.
Then I read about some of the agents, The White Mouse about Nancy Wake, a very ballsy agent,[born in NZ by the way!], Odette, about agent Odette Samsom, The Spy Who Loved by Clare Mulley, about Krystyna Skarbek, sent to Poland in late 1939.
There were so many young women: Lise de Baissac, Pearl Cornioley, Noor Inyat Khan, Andree Borrell, Denise Bloch, Mary Katherine Herbert, Phyllis Latour........and many more.
These women's lives inspired me. They were so incredibly brave.
Plucked from relatively ordinary lives and plunged into the greatest danger imaginable, where a whisper could betray you any day to the Gestapo. Where you knew the likelihood of you returning to Britain were slim. Where you could spend days alone in a foreign city or village, waiting for messages to code and send to England....and your life expectancy as a wireless operator was only 6 weeks.
Living in a safe country, far away from wars and civil strife, I wonder how many women living in the 21st century Western countries would volunteer to live and work under-cover in occupied Europe during WW2, [if time travel was a thing.] Many women in the 21st century DO live in terribly dangerous countries, Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, parts of South America....Will we hear their stories? Or will we have to wait eighty years to do so?
I wonder if I would volunteer to be an SOE agent? I don't think I would be brave enough; but I guess [and I hope], I'll never find out what I'm capable of.
I hope that my novels do bring some of these women to life, and bring some wonder and inspiration, and appreciation for their courage to my readers lives too!
The books I mention above, both fiction and non-fiction are either sitting on my bookshelves or stored in my kindle! I highly recommend them if you share my interest in this genre.
Watch out for The Bordeaux Betrayals, coming soon!
Kate Duprez
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