Felicity Goodall: The life of Suffolk writer & naturalist Mea Allen @ Southwold Literary Festival

Felicity Goodall is a former journalist who worked on regional newspapers before spending several years as a freelance foreign correspondent in Norway. She has also worked in radio & television, most recently as a BBC Radio 4 producer. She made the first programme about the life of Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack of Halifax broadcast in 1993 & produced such programmes as “Poetry Please!” & “A Good Read”. She has written 6 books of non-fiction. These include, “We Will Not Go to War”, based on interviews with men & women who took a stand against conscription, & “Exodus Burma: The British Escape Through the Jungles of Death 1942”, which told the story of half a million people who walked from Burma to India when the Japanese invaded.

“Seeking Mea Allan – Fleet Street’s Forgotten Pioneer”, published by The History Press in July this year, is her first biography.  Mea Allan was a star reporter on Britain's biggest-selling daily paper, the first woman on a Fleet Street news desk & to be permanently accredited to the British Army as a war correspondent, & the only woman to report from newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp & cover the subsequent trials. She was once so famous that her name was used to advertise Horlicks – & yet she has all but disappeared from history.  “Seeking Mea Allan” interweaves past & present as we travel from London to Glasgow, from Paris to Hamburg & beyond, to answer the questions that still linger: was Mea written out of history because of her sexuality? Or was something more subtle at work?

Unreserved seating.