Joanna Quinn is the author of the bestselling debut novel The Whalebone Theatre (2022). Grown up in Dorset, where she still lives, she has worked in journalism and the charity sector, and she teaches creative writing. She is also a short-story writer, published by The White Review and Comma Press, among others.
Joanna Quinn
Joanna Quinn
The Whalebone Theatre
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Jenna Bush Hager
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Dorset Coast
Inspiration For The Whalebone Theatre
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Athelhampton House
Inspiration for The Whalebone Theatre
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Zoe Curnow
On the Minack Theatre
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The Whalebone Theatre
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Boscombe Whale
Inspiration tor The Whalebone Theatre
The Dorset Echo, 1998
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The Dorset Museum
On Flossie Seagrave and Dorset Women During the War
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US Troops in an English Village
Imperial War Museum
Nancy Wake
Female Undercover Agent of World War II
Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris
Inspiration for The Whalebone Theatre
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The Whalebone Theatre
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Joanna Quinn In Conversation With Jenna Bush Hager
On The Whalebone Theatre
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Joanna Quinn In Conversation With Jenna Bush Hager
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The Dorset Museum
On the Fate of Stately Homes in Dorset
Featured book by Joanna Quinn
The Whalebone Theatre
Despite her adverse circumstances, young Cristabel Seagrave has big dreams for her life and is determined to write her own story. When a whale washes up on the Dorset shore, she plants her flag, and the inanimate carcass becomes the stage for Cristabel, Flossie and Digby’s imaginative plays, while her step-parents are distracted by an endless parade of party guests. But as the war approaches, the now grown-up children will find out that the roles they are expected to play are no longer those they hoped…
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The Secret Garden
By Frences Hodgson Burnet
Recommended by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & Joanna Quinn
Publish Date: 1911
Children’s book. Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle. She is spoilt and contrary, but also very lonely. Then one day she finds out about a secret garden located in the ground of Misselthwaite Manor,…
The Great Silence
By Juliet Nicolson
Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
Publish Date: 2010
In this book, Juliet Nicolson explores a fascinating moment in history, the years between 1918 and 1920, a painful reckoning for those who had lived through the peaceful Edwardian times and found themselves faced with a new and challenging reality. …
The Green Knowe Stories
By Lucy M. Boston
Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
Publish Date: 1954 – 1976
Green Knowe is a series of six children’s novels written by Lucy M. Boston and illustrated by her son Peter Boston, published from 1954 to 1976. Based on Boston’s home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, England,…
A Life in Secrets
By Sarah Helm
Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
Publish Date: 2005
With unprecedented access to official and private documents, Sarah Helm reconstructs the life of Vera Atkins, an intelligence officer who worked in the France Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War. After the war, she…
Charlotte Gray
By Sebastian Faulks
Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
Publish Date: 1998
It’s 1942 and Charlotte Gray, a young Scottish woman, is embarking on a dangerous journey to Occupied France, officially to run an errand for British special operations, but unofficially to look for her missing lover, an English airman. When she…
Among The Bohemians
By Virginia Nicholson
Recommended by: Joanna Quinn
Publish Date: 2002
In this insightful and fascinating book, Virginia Nicholson paints a portrait of the Bohemians in England, the artistic community that flourished in the early twentieth century, and their subversive social experiment.