Angharad Hampshire for The Mare

Angharad Hampshire is at The Bookshop on Thursday 3 September, talking about her debut novel The Mare, which made the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize 2025. It's a heavy subject for a Thursday night, but one that's hard to look away from: the book follows the true story of Hermine Braunsteiner, who became one of the most notoriously cruel guards at the Ravensbrück death camp and earned the nickname 'the Mare' from the prisoners. After the war, she vanished back into civilian life, married a US war veteran, and spent years as a well-liked suburban housewife in America, until a tip-off from a Holocaust survivor led a New York Times journalist to her door.

Hampshire first came across Braunsteiner through a New York Times article in December 2015, and she wrote the book as part of a Doctor of Arts at the University of Sydney. She's been open about how she approached it: grounding the scenes of violence in witness testimony while acknowledging the need to imagine her characters' inner lives. It's that tension between the recorded record and the gaps in between that gives the book its shape.

She's a familiar face in the city's writing scene, too. She's a lecturer in creative writing at York St John University and a former BBC Radio 4 producer, so she knows her way around a story and how to talk about one. This is her first novel, and it's already picked up the Walter Scott shortlist, which is the main prize for Scottish historical fiction.

The evening is at The Bookshop, 1 Museum Street, York YO1 7DT. It starts at 7pm, with doors open from 6.30pm, so you've got plenty of time to get settled before she begins.