A prize-winning novelist!


'To Untie a Sealed Knot',
2018
Holyer an Gof Awards
'To Untie a Sealed Knot' was pronounced
runner-up in the fiction for adults category.
Judges remarked that 'this author has mastered the art of show don't tell'



Use the contact form if you would like to buy

paperbacks or go to the Kindle Book store for digital editions.



Historian turned novelist; Gamekeeper turned poacher?

Picture

.For several years I provided living history services in schools using costumed interpretation to bring the past to life in the classroom. Consultancy work for museums and heritage properties followed, and I was deployed by English Heritage at Pendennis Castle in Falmouth from 1999 to devise and deliver interactive workshops for all age ranges.  A spell as head of history in FE had me in the classroom for a while too.
Back in 1995, when I came across the original documents relating to the siege of Pendennis Castle in the Cornwall Record Office, and was actually handling the very sheets on which the surrender had been negotiated, I was completely awestuck at being able to literally touch history. The compulsion to find out more led to the discovery that of nearly 1000 Royalists inside Pendennis in the spring of 1646, 200 were women and children!
How did they come to be there? Why did they stay?
And how could I give these unknown, un-named women a voice?
EXPOSED TO ALL VILLAINIES is the result of a lot of research
but is primarily a story that bugged me until I had written it. 
This one historical novel set in the seventeenth century has been brewing since 1995. It's a very different novel to the one I planned then but  'Exposed to all Villainies' complete, revised, edited, poked about and generally sifted is out there in paperback and as an e-book. Now, in the odd way that sometimes happens with writing, I discovered that wasn't 'The End'. The three women, Grace, Hester and Mary, seem to have touched the hearts of readers and so in Book II, 'A Cord of Three Strands' readers can follow their progress from 1646 to 1649.
The villain managed to wriggle out of that novel, and nobody likes untidy endings - or baddies that get away - so Book III had some work to do. 
Readers will meet a different narrator with a very different angle on the situation, and motives that, as he says himself, are 'knotty'.

Book III
 'To Untie a Sealed Knot'
Three vows will be challenged: one by a woman; one by a man; one to a king.
is now available on Kindle at
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Untie-Sealed-Knot-Pendennis-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B073Y87K5Z
ISBN 978-0-9929293-5-0


Book II
 'A Cord of Three Strands'
A Cornish fortress forged their friendship; a Cornish rebellion will test it.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01CPM6FPY
ISBN 978-0-9929293-2-9

        'Exposed to All Villainies'
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00LLH443U
    ISBN 978-0-9929293-1-2


To buy the paperbacks by post or to find your local stockist, drop me an email via the Contact page

Writing has always been part of my life. Age 5 ¾, I created the ‘Adventures of Sam the Dog’, attracting the attention of my Infant School headmistress. Later there were epic letters, some extending to eight A4 pages, written to friends and family while I was at sea with my husband, a Merchant Navy officer. I'm hoping that soon I will have some I can put up on line, a bit of a lost way of Merchant Navy life, a wife on the ocean wave, you might say...hey, perhaps there's a book in that notion!
I wrote an autobiographical ‘psychological scenic tour’ of my childhood haunts, scrawled during the long anti-social hours of the ‘doom watch’ during months on the BP Tankers. Maybe I could reverse the process and do the same for life as a seagoing wife?

Have a look at the bit of panto-inspired silliness on the site as well when I'm writing with my grandchildren in mind!
  • Member of the Society of Authors.
  • As seen on the BBC TV series 'Three Men in more than one Boat' and ITV1's 'All at Sea'. 
  • Historical consultant to BBC 'Antiques Roadshow Detectives'      
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijWSsmDOu1M
  • Photographs   This page, top by Guy Marsh. Publication page, by Ross Kingsford.
Others by Steph Haxton

Awards and accolades

  • Writer in Residence Morrab Library Penzance 2018
  • Prize winner, Holyer an Gof 2018; runner-up, adult fiction 
  • Twice nominated for the Cornish Gorsedh Holyer an Gof Award for Literature 2015 & 2017
  • Longlisted for the Winston Graham Prize 2016

Publications

  • Exposed to All Villainies
  • A Cord of Three Strands
  • To Untie a Sealed Knot
  • A star to steer her by; an insight into Cornish mariners' manuscripts: Royal Institution of Cornwall Journal 2016

Interviews

          with TJInk 
          http://bit.ly/1UBxFM8
  • On self publishing -
          http://tjink.co.uk/casestudies/chord-three-strands/