Rebecca Smith taught Creative Writing at the University of Southampton including modules on writing novels, short stories and writing for children and YA.
Rebecca Smith writes fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of six novels: The Bluebird Café, Happy Birthday and All That and A Bit of Earth (all Bloomsbury), The Ash Museum (Legend Press, 2021), Conversations With an Octopus (Legend Press, 2024) and Shadow Cat Summer (Stairwell Books, 2021) which is a novel for children.
Her works of non-fiction are The Jane Austen Writers’ Club: Inspiration and Advice from the World’s Best-Loved Novelist (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Jane Austen’s Guide to Modern Life’s Dilemmas (Ivy Press, 2014) which have been published around the world. She also wrote the text for the picture book, Where’s Jane? (Ivy Kids, 2018). She is currently working on another novel and a short book, A Walk With Jane Austen which will be published in the UK and North America in 2027.
Rebecca Smith received Arts Council Awards to support the writing of her second and fourth novels in 2001 and 2007 and The Royal Literary Fund's J.B. Priestley Award of £10,000 in 2003. An early version of Shadow Cat Summer was shortlisted for The Kelpies Prize in 2012. From 2009-2010 Rebecca Smith was the Writer in Residence at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton. Her works on Jane Austen grew from this time.
