Sister Grace – or Bob Fracklehurst as she’s known on social media – and I like walking. We like wedding dresses. We like making people laugh. And we like helping others. So, we thought, why not walk while wearing a wedding dress and laughing lots, and raise money for our charities.
So for five days, from 29th April to 4th May 2018, we will walk the Wolds Way, which is 79 miles from Hessle to Filey, Yorkshire, while wearing wedding dresses.
We are raising money for the NSPCC because, after a very tough childhood of our own, we want to support the leading children’s charity that fights to end child abuse in the UK. We are also raising money for JDRF (Juevenile Diabetes Research Foundation) because my daughter Katy has had Type 1 Diabetes for ten years since, since she was seven, and they are a charity devoted to researching this incurable, life-threatening condition, so we can hopefully one day eradicate it for good.
Below are our Just Giving pages. Please give generously.
I remember sitting in my musician father's cross-legged lap while he tried to show me the guitar chords. I was three. His music sheets fascinated me - strange language that translated into music. My mother taught French and English, so her fluency with words fired my interest.
I love all forms of writing. My short stories have won the Glass Woman Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Prose, and the Aesthetica Creative Works competition, as well as shortlisting twice for the Bridport Prize and being published in a variety of UK magazines. My first play, Afloat, was performed at Hull Truck Theatre in 2012. I also wrote a ten-year newspaper column for the Hull Daily Mail about being a parent.
My debut novel, How to be Brave, was a Guardian Readers' pick for 2015. My third novel Maria in the Moon was described as ‘quirky, darkly comic and heartfelt’ by the Sunday Mirror; The Lion Tamer Who Lost shortlisted for the Popular Romantic Novel of 2019 at the RNA Awards and longlisted for the Polari Prize 2019; Call Me Star Girl longlisted for the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and was Best magazine’s Best Book of the Year 2019; and I Am Dust was a Crime Magazine Monthly Pick. This Is How We Are Human was a Clare Mackintosh Book of the Month. Daffodils, the audiobook of my memoir, and Nothing Else were released 2022. End of Story (as Louise Swanson) and the paperback version of my memoir, Eighteen Seconds, were released in 2023.
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Louise Beech/Louise Swanson 