Lucinda Martin’s journey from teacher to author of fantasy novel

Dubai writer Lucinda Martin tells how the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature helped land a publishing deal for her debut novel Moth and the Nightingale.

Lucinda Martin says her debut novel Moth and the Nightingale is aimed at girls and has a lot of emotional hooks. Satish Kumar / The National

News of a local author landing a publishing deal is not particularly big news – until you consider who made the offer.

The Dubai writer Lucinda Martin has been signed by Chicken House, the British publishing house founded by Barry Cunningham – the man who gave the green light for J K Rowling's debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

“The offer came through at the end of December,” says Martin.

“It’s the best present I ever had.”

It was Martin's first draft of her forthcoming novel Moth and the Nightingale that landed her the deal. Set in 1937, the young-adult tale is laced with fantasy and drama as it follows a grieving child's relationship with an elderly woman she meets in the woods.

Since arriving in Dubai four years ago for a teaching job, Martin says she kept up a steady writing regimen by working on stories and focusing on her blog, Homesick and Heatstruck.

“At first I was just writing because I was homesick and just really enjoyed the process of that,” she says. “Then, really for my own pleasure, I wrote a detective novel, which I also found a lot of fun.”

Things got more serious when Martin attended the 2013 Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Impressed by the inaugural edition of the festival's in-house Montegrappa First Fiction Competition, she fulfilled her promise to enter the competition the following year – and came second after submitting the opening chapters of Moth and the Nightingale.

Inspired by success at the competition, Martin spent the rest of last year completing the first draft of the novel. It was a process that required her to give up her weekends.

“I didn’t have much of a life,” she says. “But I eventually did teaching part-time to work on it more fully.”

She says the idea for the plot was inspired and developed through her travels.

“It all came together slowly in pieces and layers,” she says.

“Like, when I was back in England, I remembered walking through the woods, which inspired the story. Also in the UK, I remember coming across this serviceman’s bible from 1914 and it felt like holding a piece of history and that inspired one of the themes within the novel.”

When it came to writing for young adults, Martin drew on her teaching experience.

“I teach 11- to 18-year-olds nearly every day, so I would like to think I know something about what gets their imagination engaged,” she says.

“They need to be hooked from the first page. My novel is aimed at girls mostly, so there are a lot of emotional hooks, with relationships between siblings, and parents with children.”

Excited by the novel’s prospects, the renowned literary agent and Montegrappa First Fiction Competition judge Luigi Bonomi shopped the book around until Chicken House was convinced to take it on.

Martin and the publishers plan to spent the rest of this year editing the book and hope it will hit the shelves early next year.

That would be just in time, she hopes, to return to the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature as an author. “Now that would be absolutely wonderful,” she says.

• For more information on the Montegrappa First Fiction Competition, visit www.emirateslitfest.com