Cecily is a copy-editor and proofreader with The History Quill. Originally from Herefordshire, Cecily studied English Literature at the University of York and worked for several years at an independent publisher in London. Her first novel, The Long Journey Home, set in Burma in 1942, won the 2019 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for unpublished manuscripts and was published by Bonnier Zaffre in June 2021. She is currently working on her second novel, a historical espionage thriller, set in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Second World War.

If Cecily were stranded on a desert island, the historical novels she would want with her are The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which is probably her favourite novel and gets better each time she reads it, and the Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker, in which Barker’s depiction of the First World War is brilliant and heartbreaking.