After receiving rave reviews for her first novel, Kings Heath author Katie Bishop recently published her latest book High Season, a psychological thriller, which has once again earned plaudits from leading literary critics

Katie Bishop says growing up she always “loved books and loved writing”. So, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that she was likely always destined to become a top author. But there were times along the way it seemed that might just be out of reach. Even Katie herself admits that while she dreamed of one day publishing a novel, she never really thought it would actually happen.
She says: “I didn’t think it was a real job. I didn’t know anyone who had a career in writing. I didn’t know anyone with a creative career actually. It seemed impossible, unattainable.” Happily for her, and us, that wasn’t the case, thanks to her amazing talent and sheer persistence.

Her debut novel The Girls of Summer, a psychological thriller based on around a woman’s summer romance with a much older man, arrived on the bookshelves in 2023 and won rave reviews – and awards – as a ‘must-read’ from critics as diverse as The Times and Independent, to the Sun, New York Post and Glamour magazine. Her latest novel, a gripping thriller titled High Season, has been equally well-received. All of which delights Katie, who grew up living in Nuneaton with a mum and grandparents from Birmingham, and who now lives with her husband in Kings Heath.

CHECK-OUT

Katie, who studied English Literature at university, worked on the check-out in a supermarket in Nuneaton for a year while she worked out what she wanted to do with her life. She started working at an academic publisher – assistant editor, essentially an admin job peer reviewing. She stayed there for six or seven years but says she felt miserable and unfulfilled.

In her twenties she started to think, ‘what do I actually enjoy?’ She says: “I started writing a novel at that point. I did 12 drafts which took five years!” She approached a lot of agents and while she had a bit of interest she was ultimately unsuccessful in her attempt to get published. “Some agents didn’t respond at all, some came back with a rejection and a couple showed a bit of interest but it didn’t lead anywhere.”

Katie started doing a bit of journalism on the side – for the New York Times, Guardian, Independent and Vogue, among others. As her journalism started to take off, she went part-time at the academic publisher, which proved to be bad timing as it coincided with Covid. “All of a sudden no editors were commissioning. People were terrified about the future. It was scary losing work.” Katie also lost someone close to her during the pandemic.

EARLY STARTS

“I had an extra couple of days a week, so I started writing The Girls of Summer. I wasn’t commuting anymore. I’d get up at 5am and write for a couple of hours even on the days I was working.” Katie wrote The Girls of Summer quickly in just nine months. She pulled out the spreadsheet of agents she’d compiled for the first unsuccessful book and began contacting them starting with her top six dream agents. She expected a long process and a lot of rejection thanks to the experience with the first book, but all but one came back and wanted to read the whole book.

Offers came in quickly after that. Katie got an agent, who she’s still with, sent the book to publishers and ended up with multiple pre-empts (when a publisher wants to skip the offers and auction process and just puts a figure down that hopefully secures a deal without an auction.) Katie says it was the polar opposite to the first book. She went with Penguin here in the UK and has a lovely publisher in the US too.

“It all just happened very quickly, and on a much bigger scale than I ever dreamed it would,” says Katie. “I don’t think I could really believe it – it had been a lifelong dream and I knew how difficult it was, so the whole thing was far beyond my expectations. My first effort not getting picked up was devastating. I’d had no formal training so in a way writing that first book was the equivalent of that.”

She says she learned about pacing and structure. “The topic of The Girls of Summer was unintentionally very ‘zeitgeisty’,” she says. “It’s set on a Jeffrey Epstein-esque island.” While it was written before the high-profile underage sex scandal involving the US financier, it was published at that time.

MORE TO COME

With High Season, Katie says she experienced the ‘second book syndrome’. “I had a huge crisis of confidence. It was a challenging process. You have to have a lot of optimism and possibly slight delusion to write a novel. I was just being a lot more critical. I wrote and scrapped two novels. I was in a spiral of self-doubt and it took me a long time to get to a concept I was happy with.”

Now that High Season is published and earning widespread plaudits, Katie is turning her attention to a third novel, about which she says she can’t say too much. It’s a completely different genre – historical fiction – and she says: “Writing it has been a complete joy. I just felt so strongly about it. I kept it a secret for a while. It’s such a relief.”
In between novels Katie has dozens of ideas and gets inspiration from everywhere – reading lots, of course, and watching a lot of TV, especially reality shows like Real Housewives and Made in Chelsea.

Katie moved to Kings Heath without doing much research but says she “absolutely loves it”. She adds: “There’s great pubs, restaurants, and a brilliant bookshop – the Heath Bookshop which was voted the best in the UK.”