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Josa Keyes
ALLi Author Member
Location: United Kingdom (the)
Genres: General Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance, Womens Fiction, Other Poetry
Skills: Performance/Spoken Word, Press/Media Interview, Reading/Literary Event, Writing Workshop
Josa Keyes (formerly Josa Young) was born in Kent, England, the fourth of five children, which led to a certain amount of benign neglect. Unable to read until she was seven, which appeared to be no bad thing as she spent most waking hours outside, she then devoured everything that Kaye Webb's Puffin Books could produce. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University, where she went to a lot of parties and sang and danced on stage. She entered the Vogue Talent Competition in her last year and went to work at Vogue magazine, as Copy Editor among other things, which taught her vital editing skills that have been useful ever since. She then took various commissioning editor roles in magazines and newspapers, including Country Living and The Times. An early internet adopter, unlike many of her journalist generation, she started producing internet content in 1996. She has now moved wholly into digital content strategy and copywriting. Running in parallel, she has always written fiction and poetry - a choice of activity that has resulted in some classic rejection letters over the years. This has progressed slowly due to three children coming first in her priorities. Her first novel, One Apple Tasted, was published in 2009 by Elliott & Thompson. Her second, Sail Upon the Land, she has published herself in December 2014. It was long listed for the Historical Novel Society Award. In 2019, she took her Master's in Creative Writing at Brunel University London, supervised by Bernardine Evaristo, with distinction. She won the Arts & Humanities Faculty dissertation prize. In 2021, she is publishing her poetry in a slim volume titled My Love Life & Other Disasters, and looking for new marketing ideas for poetry as things have moved on since her last self-publishing venture in 2014.
Josa Keyes' books
One Apple Tasted
Meet Dora Jerusalem, features assistant to the assistant features editor at Modern Woman, a fashionable glossy staffed by glamorous girls and clever boys. Catapulted into 1980s London and desperate to succeed, Dora is drawn into a whirl of launches and parties where she meets Guy Boleyn, louche and gorgeous - but from a very different world.
Follow the ever-optimistic Dora as she navigates her way through a maze of jealous frenemies, family secrets, weddings that don't exactly go to plan and a heritage of passion and drama - trying to reach that elusive fairytale ending.
Kicking off in 1980s London, and moving between 1950s Home Counties and WWII, by way of a breathtaking trip to Himalayan India, Josa Young perfectly captures the tone of each era, to paint a touchingly accurate portrait of a young woman struggling towards happiness.
Brilliantly characterised, engaging and witty, One Apple Tasted is part family saga, part romance, part coming-of-age tale, all adding up to the perfect cheering holiday read.
Sail Upon the Land
'Josa Young writes with warmth and wisdom about the complexities of motherhood in this captivating tale of four generations of women that sweeps eighty years of English history. Her eye for period detail is masterly and her characters so vivid they dance from the page and into our hearts.'
RACHEL HORE
What happens when two fractured families collide in the dynamic social landscape of the last eighty years?
An accidental inheritance changes everything for an insecure young man.
The mysterious death of a new mother damages the precious continuity of love.
And a gap-year student's misguided romance ends in life-changing disaster. Or does it?
SARAH
Is the courage she displays during WWII enough to carry her through a long life of love and loss?
LILLIAN
Living in her own fairytale, will she find the strength she needs to survive reality?
DAMSON
Rejecting her background when her stepmother makes life intolerable, can this driven young woman ever find her way home?
LILY
Who is she really, and will she deliver the one precious gift that will heal all their wounds?
My Love Life & Other Disasters
51 recent poems, some previously published in the Telegraph and the Amorist magazine. Publication date is 1 June 2021.