Having missed our December and January dates because of the pesky omicron, we're delighted to launch our February meeting and hope that you can join us once again at the Rose Theatre Cafe. Any ticketholders for December who opted to rollover their ticket will be very welcome - please let us know if you intend on coming, so we can keep an eye on numbers, and if you can't make it, you can rollover until the next time you do want to come.

Olga Wojtas is an unconventional – and very witty – writer of postmodern crime fiction whose surrealist humour has been compared to the likes of PG Wodehouse, Jasper Fforde and the Marx Brothers. Her debut novel, Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar, was published in the UK and US to great critical acclaim – being longlisted for the inaugural Comedy Women in Print Prize 2019, shortlisted for a CrimeFest Award, and named as one of the best mysteries and thrillers of the year by Kirkus. A journalist for more than 30 years, Olga was Scottish editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement before she began adding creative writing to her portfolio. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2015 and has had numerous short stories and several novellas published. Olga’s second novel, Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace, was published in 2020. She also writes the Bunburry cosy mystery series (13 so far!) under the pen name of Helena Marchmont for German publisher Bastei Entertainment. Olga is going to talk to us about how she came to be published as an unagented author.

Andrea Joyce is a freelance rights agent working for Jenny Brown Associates as Rights Director and also handling rights for several independent publishers. She has spent the last year covering a sabbatical as a Translation Rights Agent at Curtis Brown and before that she was Rights Director at Canongate Books for thirteen years. Prior to that she was Rights Manager at HarperCollins in London for three years and she started her career in publishing at Bantam Doubleday Dell in New York where she spent two years in the contracts team before becoming Rights Manager at Farrar Straus & Giroux also in New York for two years. Andrea will give us an overview of what rights are, why they can be important to an author, how it all works in terms of rights sales, plus the difference between having one's rights handled by a publisher or an agent (having been on both sides).

As usual, our speakers will kick off at about 7.30, but please feel free to come along a bit earlier and grab something to eat from the Rose Theatre Cafe's delicious menu, or to meet up with your writer friends for a drink and a chat.