Manda Scott
Manda Scott born and brought up in Scotland, started her professional life as a veterinary surgeon, specialising in equine neonatal intensive care. She changed to writing full time when her first novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and continued until 2016, when she studied for a Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College. Since then, she has become a smallholder, a podcaster and a screenwriter. She is co-founder of Accidental Gods and Narrative Ark.
Scott came to write the four Boudica: Dreaming novels, this was as much as she knew. Her own shamanic practice pushed her to shift from writing crime to writing history and sustained her for 6 years of intense productivity, believing that if she could show who the ancestors of her lands had been, it would provide a blueprint for who the peoples not just of Britain, but of the world, could be: that the world would change. In this session, she tells the story of Boudica, of writing Boudica and explores who we might be if that last battle had gone the other way. Along the way, she explains why there aren’t knives on the wheels of the chariots, how Boudica got her name, and why pretty much all the historians are wrong in their identification of the landing place of the invasion.
