AUTHOR PROFILE
Rosalind Stopps
Margaret James talks to an author whose books telling the stories of people who are often overlooked always start from the question ‘what if...?’
Rosalind Stopps’s latest novel Virginia Lane is Not a Hero is an engaging but also challenging and – at times – uncomfortable story, which Rosalind says she hopes will appeal to readers who care about what is going on around them, and who are thoughtful rather than judgmental.
‘The starting point for this book was a newspaper article about two little children who had died in exactly the place where they should have been safe – in their family home,’ Rosalind says. ‘Some people had realised what was happening, and they’d tried to raise the alarm, but nobody had listened. I kept thinking that anything would have been better for those children than what actually happened to them. Even if someone had run away with them, they would have had a chance. It was an easy step from there to rescuing one of them in a story.
‘It was only later, looking back at the book, that I could see I’d also used my fictional child Ocean’s story to highlight the fact that the world has never been a more perilous place for babies, because from Palestine to Sudan and everywhere else that is (or is going to be) affected by climate change, babies are in danger, and I only wish I could rescue them all.