Ep. 210 - Crime author Jo Callaghan on overcoming personal grief and rejection to write an award-winning novel

Page One - The Writer's Podcast

Jo Callaghan works full time as a senior strategist, carrying out research into the future impact of AI and genomics on the workforce. She was a student of the Writers’ Academy Course (Penguin Random House) and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Writing Competition and Bath Novel Competition. After losing her husband to cancer in 2019 when she was just forty-nine, she started writing In the Blink of an Eye, her debut crime novel, which explores learning to live with loss and what it means to be human. It went on to win huge prizes, and her latest is a follow up entitled Leave No Trace.

We had a great chat with Jo, hearing about how she dealt with initial rejection, including two books failing on submission, and how personal grief led to her finding her authentic voice and writing In The Blink of An Eye. We also chat about AI more generally, and the threats it can pose, and whether it is all doom and gloom from writers' perspectives.

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