Good afternoon.

It’s such a pleasure to be here today. It’s a huge honour to be asked to deliver a keynote speech at any festival, but especially a festival like this. A festival that exists to promote and celebrate women writers over 50.

So I’d like to start by thanking you all for coming along today, and also thanking Sam Johnson and Anna Jefferson for inviting me. It’s always slightly dangerous to give a crime writer a microphone for thirty minutes, but I promise you, there won’t be a body at the end of it. At least, I hope not! There may, however, be a few myths we’ll need to quietly dispose of.

I’m guessing that some of you here today are already published authors, or working within the publishing industry in one form or another. Some of you though may be halfway through a novel or short story or collection of poetry or piece of non-fiction that you’d like to publish one day, or you might have been ‘about to start’ for years and have never quite got round to it. Some of you might have spent most of your life dabbling in creative fiction, while others may well be thinking that you’ve left it too late, or that the industry prefers younger voices, or that it’s indulgent for you to focus on this now.

I’m hoping that by the end of today, some of those quiet, limiting beliefs will have been firmly shown the door.
But first, I’m going to start by telling you something that happened to me in 2019. It was the year my debut novel, The Rumour, was published and I was just 55. I say ‘just’ because I’m now 62 and from where I’m standing, 55 seems impossibly young! I was at my aunt’s funeral, and afterwards, at the wake, the husband of a family member whom I hadn’t seen for quite some time, was congratulating me on the success of my novel – at least, I think that’s what he was trying to do, because at one point, he put his head on one side and said, in a very cloying, almost sympathetic voice: ‘How do you feel, though, Lesley, that it’s all happened so late in your life? It must be a little bit, you know, annoying that it didn’t happen sooner.’

And for a few seconds, I was so taken aback by this, so incredulous that this was his reaction to my success, that I was speechless, which isn’t something that happens to me very often. But then, thankfully, something inside me reared up like a beast escaping its shackles, and I looked him in the eye, and said: I’m absolutely delighted that it’s happened now. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted and just think, it might never have happened, and for many people, it never does.’

But later that evening, when I was deconstructing our conversation, his question revealed something I hadn’t fully articulated before and that is how deeply we are conditioned to see youth as the only appropriate season for ambition and achievement. And how that conditioning seems to press much more heavily on women. A man who succeeds later in life is often admired for his endurance, or his late-blooming brilliance. Whereas a woman who succeeds later is subtly asked why she didn’t do it sooner, or else she’s regarded as some kind of exception to the rule.

It’s often assumed that when a woman finally chooses herself, and starts to take her creative ambitions seriously, it’s some kind of eccentricity or midlife crisis – something that requires explanation, or questioning – but more often than not, the reasons for this delayed agency are structural. For so many women, myself included, the years between 20 and 50 are jam-packed with responsibilities. Is it any wonder then that so many of us find ourselves parking our writing ambitions during these years?

Because creativity needs time. It requires breathing space. It demands periods of solitude. And unless we’re ruthlessly single-minded, or we make a deliberate choice early on in our lives to pursue our ambitions at any cost, solitude is a luxury most of us don’t have in our younger years.

For many women, then, it isn’t a question of ‘why so late?’
It’s a question of ‘when else could it have happened?’

Now for me, writing was something I always did in the margins. Between paid work and the endless demands of family life. I didn’t even call myself a writer. Didn’t dare to. It felt indulgent and slightly embarrassing. A private longing I wasn’t entirely sure I was entitled to.

For years, I tried to write a novel. A few chapters here, a few chapters there. Always starting things, but rarely ever finishing them. I wonder if that pattern sounds familiar to some of you? I bet it does.

In my thirties, I went to university as a mature student to study English. I should perhaps have gone straight from school, but in the 1970s, careers advice for girls at the local comprehensive where I went, was abysmal, and you were normally funnelled into nursing, or secretarial work, or teaching. I ended up doing all three of those things actually. So there we go. But anyway, while I was doing my English degree, I took a creative writing module and the feedback I received on one of my assignments, which was to reimagine a scene from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, which is a brilliant novel, by the way, was that I had ‘a genuine gift for narrative’. And those five words had a profound effect on me. They were validation that I wasn’t deluding myself. But I remember feeling two things at once.

Delight. That someone whose opinion I respected – a wonderful tutor called Vicky Joyce – actually thought I had some talent.

And, believe it or not, I also felt sadness and regret. Because I genuinely believed, at the age of thirty-eight, that I’d left it too late to be a writer.

Thirty-eight. Can you imagine? It’s that conditioning I mentioned earlier, that ridiculous narrative that our ambitions are only worth pursuing if we’re young, and it can be so ingrained, that we don’t interrogate it or challenge it.

So fast forward through a teaching career, divorce, new relationship, a senior management post, raising three boys, chronic illness (I suffered for many years with undiagnosed endometriosis), surgery, clinical depression, a writing course and still more rejections than I care to count, one day, shortly after I’d made my peace with the idea that I might never be published, I entered a crime-writing competition on a whim.
I didn’t win. I was one of the runners-up. But it led to an agent, and a book deal.
And suddenly, at fifty-five, I was an ‘overnight success.’

I’m now six books in, and I can honestly say that there are definite advantages to becoming a writer later in life.

Because with age comes a stronger sense of self.

By midlife, many of us have already navigated things that rearrange us – divorce, illness, career shifts, financial anxiety, caring responsibilities, loss, starting again. We have been stretched and challenged and we’ve learned, hopefully, that our identity doesn’t just rest on one outcome.

And of course, our lives don’t all follow the same template. Some of us have raised children. Some of us haven’t. Some have married, divorced, remarried – some have chosen entirely different paths. But however our lives have unfolded, they have been full. They have shaped us.

And perhaps most importantly, because of our experiences, we’ve developed a greater tolerance for uncertainty.

Which is incredibly useful in this industry because publishing is by its very nature uncertain. Writing is uncertain. Creative work is a long game full of pauses, detours, self-doubt, rejections, more self-doubt, reinventions, (did I mention self-doubt?), and unexpected turns.

So if you’ve got this far in life, you’re already trained for uncertainty. You know that not everything unfolds neatly.

And above all, you have lived. You have a deeper well to draw from.

And the wonderful thing about writing is that there’s no upper age limit. There are many women who get published later in life, and from my experience, and from talking to other writers, I’ve never heard of anyone’s manuscript being rejected because they were too old. Agents and editors are not the slightest bit interested in your date of birth. What they want, above all else, are good stories. And who better to deliver good stories than women who understand that life is messy, morally complicated and emotionally layered.

So yes, good stories matter most.

But – there’s always a ‘but’, isn’t there? – as I wrote recently in The Bookseller, the industry could be far more ambitious in how it markets to older women, and in how often it commissions novels where women of our age are complex leads rather than supporting characters or lazy stereotypes. I argued that publishers could do much more to reflect the realities and the economic power of older female readers, many of whom are still saying they simply don’t see themselves on the page.

In that piece, I reflected on what happened when one fairly low-tech, midlife author (yours truly, although I don’t really know why I’m still calling myself a ‘midlife author’ unless I’m planning to live until I’m 120!) posted a simple selfie with the words: ‘This is for every woman who thinks she’s left it too late…’

What happened next astonished me. Over a million views later, my inbox was filled with messages from women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, many of which were painful to read because they really did feel that they’d left it too late. They said the post resonated with them because they wanted that permission to imagine they still had agency. Still had potential. Still had stories worth telling.

If one post can generate that response, what could happen if the industry actively commissioned and championed more stories where older women are not confined to cosy corners or stereotypes, but allowed to be ambitious, messy, furious, contradictory and central?

Because this isn’t about niche marketing. We are not a niche. We represent a huge section of society and we read and buy a hell of a lot of books! Every book event or festival I attend, I can honestly say that when I look out over the audience, it’s an overwhelmingly older, female demographic. So this is about cultural accuracy.

So yes, publishers can do more. Marketing departments can do more. Commissioning editors can do more.
But the industry can’t publish the books we don’t write.

If there aren’t enough novels where women in their fifties, sixties and seventies are complex leads, then some of that responsibility sits here, in rooms like this.

Because who is going to write those stories if we don’t?

And speaking as a crime writer, if all the high-stakes fiction centres on people under thirty-five, we absorb a quiet message about whose lives are considered dramatic enough, interesting enough, important enough to carry a novel.

And yet we know that midlife and beyond is anything but quiet.

This is the stage of life when many women do the bravest things they’ve ever done.

They move cities. They end long marriages or relationships. They start businesses. They study for degrees. They volunteer. They bury parents. They fall in love again. They uncover secrets. And they’re doing all these things, many of them, while still working full-time, still navigating all the shit that life throws at them.
That isn’t a subplot. That is story.

Our lives are worthy of being centre stage.

So instead of asking whether there’s a market, or whether it’s too late, or whether anyone will want to read about a woman of fifty-two or sixty-five or seventy-eight…
Write her.

Because the appetite is there. You’ve only got to look at how successful Sally Wainwright’s ‘Riot Women’ was on the BBC recently to know that.

And the publishing industry – however traditional it may be – eventually follows where readers lead.
So it really is up to us.

Now that’s not to say we can’t write younger protagonists if we want to. Of course we can. I write psychological thrillers, and I think my oldest protagonist is in her early forties, at least twenty years younger than me.

In fact, when I was on BBC Woman’s Hour recently, Nuala McGovern quite rightly picked me up on that. She said, ‘Lesley, you’re saying all this about older women, so why haven’t you written an older protagonist?’
And I had to laugh. Because she was right. I think I recovered well and said something about my particular genre tending to have younger protagonists. But that moment made me think.

Even those of us who are conscious of representation in fiction can still default to the cultural norm. We absorb it. We internalise it. We imagine drama as belonging to youth because that’s what we’ve so often been shown.

It’s not always deliberate. Sometimes it’s simply habit. And breaking habit, creatively, requires intention. It requires us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions.

Why did I instinctively make her younger?

What assumptions was I making about pace, risk, sexuality, danger?

What did I subconsciously believe about who could carry a high-stakes plot?

Because a woman in her fifties and beyond can be as reckless as a woman in her twenties. She can be as ambitious or angry or desiring or morally compromised as the next person.

In fact, sometimes more so because she has less to lose and far less patience. I don’t know about you, but one of the things I’m finding about this part of my life is I’m far less of a people-pleaser than I used to be.
So yes, I’m writing that older protagonist now.

And perhaps the real challenge isn’t simply to the industry.

Perhaps it’s to ourselves.

Not just about who we choose to centre on the page, but about how seriously we choose to take the work itself.

Because at some point – and this is different for all of us – there comes a quiet but decisive shift. The shift from wanting to write to committing to write.

Wanting is romantic. It lives in our notebooks and conversations and the phrase: ‘I’ve always wanted to write a novel.’ Committing is less glamorous. It involves finishing drafts that don’t yet work. It involves writing when you don’t feel inspired. It involves learning things you’d rather skip: structure, pacing, point of view, genre expectations. It involves editing. Ruthless editing.

There comes a point where you have to stop calling it a hobby. Not because hobbies are trivial – they aren’t – but because language shapes behaviour. If you treat it like a hobby, you will give it leftover time. If you treat it like work, whether it’s paid or unpaid, you will protect it.

And for some of you, time is still scarce. They don’t call us the sandwich generation for nothing. Many older women are supporting ageing parents while still showing up for children or grandchildren. But commitment to your writing ambitions doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility. It means negotiating with it. You will guard thirty minutes or an hour in the morning or the evening or whatever time you can spare. You will show up even when the sentences are clumsy. You will finish your first draft even if it disappoints you. And it will!
Because finishing badly is far more powerful and effective than starting beautifully.

A finished, flawed manuscript can be improved. It can be edited, reshaped, strengthened. An unfinished one can only be imagined.

The writers who move forward are not always the most naturally gifted. They are often the ones who learn the craft seriously, who study structure, who understand their genre, who accept that rewriting is not a sign of failure but of professionalism. And they are the ones who understand that rejection is not a verdict on their worth. It is part of the job description.

Which is why a festival like Forthwrite is so important. Because it brings us together and allows us to share our experiences, to meet and listen to like-minded people, people who get it – what it’s like to carry this quiet, persistent compulsion to write. And it is a compulsion.

When we were younger, there was no internet, no social media, and nowhere near as many writing events and festivals like this. It was much harder for us to find our writing tribe. But fortunately, we can do that now. And let me tell you, when women writers come together to support and encourage each other, amazing things can happen. It makes such a difference to know that we’re not alone in our ambitions. And it helps younger women too. Because they can see us still striving, still achieving, still creating.

Nothing about creative ambition is indulgent. Nothing about it is eccentric. It is evidence of something alive in you. Something that needs to come out.

So know this: you are not behind. You are not an exception. You are not ‘too late.’

You are a woman who has lived long enough to have something to say and you are brave enough to consider saying it.

So write the book, or the poem, or the short story, or the memoir. Or the thing you’ve been quietly postponing for years.

Because the door is not closing.

If anything, this is the moment when you finally step through it.

 

Proud to partner with our official bookseller