It’s never too late to write a first novel, as former BBC chairman Sir Christopher Bland has proved. At the age of 75, he has penned a work called Ashes in the Wind, described as an epic story of two Irish tribes, the Anglo-Irish Burkes and the Catholic Irish Sullivans from 1919 to 2010.
“Ashes in the Wind is a novel where scene after scene gave me goosebumps,” says Rosie de Courcy, who signed the deal for publishers Head of Zeus, “not only because it is beautifully written but because it has so many echoes of my own family’s Irish history.”
Bland, a member of the Irish fencing team at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, was once chairman of Century Hutchinson where Rosie and her then husband Anthony Cheetham used to work and is currently chairman of Canongate, run by his stepson Jamie Byng.
Cheetham describes Bland’s debut as “first-rate storytelling … It has a special meaning for me since Christopher was my chairman during a time that saw Century Publishing turn from a staff of 25 into a major publishing house with a staff of 500 in three continents.”
That’ll be goosebumps all round.
