Emily Maguire

I’m the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books and was the 2018/2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney and the 2023 HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the Australian National University. My new novel RAPTURE is inspired by a thousand year-old story about a clever girl who dresses as a man to follow her lover to a monastery where she becomes a brilliant scholar and teacher, and eventually ends up — still in careful disguise — the most powerful person in Rome. This novel is somewhat of a departure, in that all my previous novels are set more or less in the here and now and RAPTURE is set in the early middle ages and moves from northern Germany to Athens to Rome. And yet, I feel like it’s the book I’ve been working towards for my whole writing life. The story of an ambitious woman in a world where women are supposed to be modest. A woman whose mind refuses to accept a small life, and whose body is reviled while remaining, for her, a source of great joy. A woman, who, like so many oppressed people throughout history, finds a way to subvert and resist. To be who she is without permission or approval. People have been telling the story of a female pope for a millennium. In RAPTURE this legendary, much-argued over figure is a flesh-and-blood woman of ingenuity, purpose and passion. Her name is Agnes, and I’m excited for you to meet her.