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Katie Lowe is a contemporary literary fiction author from Worcester, UK best known for the critically acclaimed novel “The Furies.” The University of Birmingham graduate has a bachelor’s in English and a Masters in Philosophy in Literature and Modernity. She first gained prominence when she started blogging about feminism, body image, and health on her blog “Fat Girl Ph.D.” in 2012. She is currently working on a Ph.D. Her writing has been featured in prestigious publications that include the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent in addition to several other publications in Australia, Canada, and the USA. It was in the initial stages of writing her Ph.D. thesis that she began to blog as Fat Girl PhD. She used her blog to analyze her experiences of self-image and weight loss away from the rigors of academic writing and was surprised when her audience grew to more than 100,000 users within months. In the twelve months she spent blogging, she gained new perspectives from the real-life challenges of her readers and feminism, which she then distilled in “The Furies.” She submitted the manuscript to several publishers and the bidding war resulted in a six-figure deal with Harper Fiction in the UK and another with St. Martin’s Press in North America. The novel was published in 2019 in what Lowe described as a surreal experience.

Katie Lowe always knew that she loved to write though she never thought she was good enough to do fiction. For the longest time, she wanted to become a nonfiction writer working in either journalism or as an academic. There is a picture of her as an eight-year-old when she begged her parents to get her a typewriter. Lowe still has that picture of herself sitting in front of her brand new typewriter wearing an Aladdin t-shirt. Fast forward to 2014 and after publishing very popular articles on her blog and on prestigious publications such as the BBC and the Independent, she got an agent and they talked about her writing some non-fiction. Her book was to be on the themes she talked about on her blog but the idea never went anywhere. It was then that her agent suggested she try her hand at fiction as she believed she would be great at it. She made several attempts at writing her novel and trashed several manuscripts until she finally managed to write one she liked a little bit more. Her agent loved it and when she finally got published, she knew that she wanted to write professionally.

Katie Lowe has always wanted to write a novel about teenage girls for a very long time. The inspiration for her novel came from watching the teenager in the film “The Craft” who struggled with teenage life. As a teenager, she felt an intense connection with the teenager and wanted to explore those feelings. Lowe is also fascinated by the idea of women standing up to the patriarchy, which can sometimes result in horrific consequences. She was motivated to trace the lineage of people that have stood up against oppression and then wrote to write her contemporary experience from that context. Some of the novel is thus based on her experience though it does draw a lot from other perspectives. For instance, she says that she has three friends that she would hang out and share experiences with. Lowe links to some of the things that happened to her and her friends but does not necessarily make it an autobiographical novel. As such, she does include things that did not happen from experience and is total fiction. It was also inspired by her blogs about body image, health, and feminism that drew a lot from her readers’ experiences too. Some of her themes from the blog have thus been carried over from the blog to the novel. For instance, she was angry when writing about body image, the perception of women in the culture, and structural issues in feminism. She thus uses her characters such as Robin to pick at her size, weight and image issues. With Annabel the teacher, she gives extreme lectures on feminism that sometimes may seem logically extreme.

“The Furies” by Katie Lowe is a novel set in 1998, where the body of a sixteen-year-old is found on the boarding school’s property posed on a swing. The cause of death is unknown and the girl is dressed all in white. There are rumors and whispers but no one has any answers. Only a few people know what had transpired and one girl refuses to forget. Violet had been enrolled as a new student at the Elm Hollow Academy a year before. It is a girls’ only boarding school in the suburbs of a quaint coastal town. She is leaving her demons behind and sees this as a chance to start afresh. She is bright but she is desperate, uncertain and her awkwardness makes it hard to fit in. Violet thinks she is making headway when she gets an invite to a study group led by Annabel, a mysterious but alluring art teacher. She schools with three other girls Robin, Grace, and Alex and the five of them dive into the long-buried history of the school. It includes Celtic and Greek legends, gruesome 17th-century witch trials, and interest in the occult by the founder of the school. Annabel tries to convince the students that ancient rituals and rites are not part of her class and are just mythology or ancient history. But the more she tries to play it down and discourage their interest, the more they are attracted to the power which they want to harness for their own use. Violet soon finds herself entangled in a new world where she has access to unbridled power. But the disappearance of the mother of one of the group nettles her given that she shares an uncanny resemblance to Violet. Meanwhile, her friends’ actions are spiraling out of control and turning darker making her stat to wonder if there is anyone she can trust. How far will the girls go to destroy or protect each other?

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