About Harriet Springbett

Hello! I’m Harriet, I’m a writer and I’m English. Actually, that’s not quite true because I’ve been living in France for so long that I’m a bit of a Franglais hybrid, neither French nor English.

I grew up on a farm in West Dorset and qualified as a manufacturing engineer before fleeing to France in 1995 to escape machines and numbers. I studied French at Pau university but only became bilingual when I met my French partner, who taught me slang and rude words. We have two teenage daughters and live among the vines in Poitou-Charentes.

During my 27 years in France, I’ve written 5 novels, lots of non-fiction features and have had short stories (and a few poems) published in literary magazines and placed in several competitions. These include a shortlisting in the Bath Short Story Award 2017: my story Big Bones was published in the anthology, which has some fabulous stories in it and can be bought from the BSSA website.

My debut novel, Tree Magic, was a runner-up in a first novel competition and was then published by the wonderful Impress Books in January 2017. Trees are awesome! We should talk about them more. Tree Magic was subsequently re-published by Impress Books with a new cover in June 2020, followed by its sequel, Tree Slayer, in October 2020. The final book in the trilogy, Tree Sacrifice, came out in September 2021. You can find out more about these books in the Tree Magic Series tab of this blog. I’ve also put some links to some reviews in the Reviews tab.

To find out more about my work, you can watch a video interview (June 2020) with the CEO of Impress Books. Or listen to a radio interview dating from October 2020. And here’s a silly short video I made about Tree Magic back in 2017, when it was only an e-book. Alternatively, you can find links to some written Q&A interviews at the bottom of the Reviews tab of this blog.

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In my Playground of Words and Thoughts, I blog about life in France and local literary and cultural events, particularly those that concern English writers and readers. There are also some posts about my writing activities and my route to publication.

The News section of my playground contains news about my short stories, judging and workshops etc.

My 2017 writing residency in the Pyrenees proved such a popular feature of my blog that I’ve given it a separate menu called (in a fit of creative originality) Pyrenees Writing Residency.

I also blog about my cycle-sightseeing tours in France. In 2019 I did a 7-day blog sprint about my discovery of the Charente river, which you can read (in the right order) in Doorstep Cycling. I did the same thing with my blog sprint on becoming Abandoned Parents in Abandoned, which is actually about cycling in the Dronne area of the Dordogne. At the moment I’m exploring the Flow Vélo cycleway in the Charente and Dordogne, and you can read these exploits in La Flow Vélo Cycle Route.

Finally, I’ve added links to some of my Short Stories.

If you’d like me to talk to your writing group / school / dog, give me a shout on my ‘Contact Me‘ page. I’m also happy to lead writing workshops, speak at writing events and judge short story competitions.

Now, back to the playground.

Writing can be a lonely business. A playground is a good place to make friends and have some fun. If you’d like to play too, then come along and join me.