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Imogen Hermes Gowar

Biography

Imogen Hermes Gowar

Imogen Hermes Gowar studied Archaeology, Anthropology and Art History at UEA’s Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts before going on to work in museums. She began to write small pieces of fiction inspired by the artefacts she worked with and around, and in 2013 won the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Scholarship to study for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. 

She won the Curtis Brown Prize for her dissertation, which grew into a novel titled THE MERMAID AND MRS. HANCOCK. An early draft was a finalist in the MsLexia First Novel Competition 2015, and it was also one of three entries shortlisted for the inaugural Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers’ Award.

Imogen Hermes Gowar

Books by Imogen Hermes Gowar

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
by Imogen Hermes Gowar - Fiction, Historical Fiction

One September evening in 1785, Jonah Hancock hears an urgent knocking on his front door near the docks of London. The captain of one of Jonah’s trading vessels bears shocking news. On a voyage to the Far East, he sold Jonah’s ship for something rare and far more precious: a mermaid. Thrust from his ordinary existence, somber Jonah finds himself moving from the city’s seedy underbelly to the finest drawing rooms of high society. At an opulent party, he makes the acquaintance of the coquettish Angelica Neal. This meeting sparks a perilous liaison that steers both their lives onto a dangerous new course as they come to realize that priceless things often come at the greatest cost.