K-SAA Interview With Joanna Brown, author of the Lizzie and Belle Mysteries

In our “Romanticism Beyond the Academy” series, we invite literature-lovers to reflect on the significance of Romantic-era writers and ideas in the contemporary world and/or in their own lives. In the following interview, Joanna Brown reflects on her academic research as well as her middle-grade historical fiction series, The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries, illustrated by Simone Douglas. To write or interview for this series, contact us. This post is also part of a video interview series. Watch below or here and subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries is a middle-grade historical fiction series based on the lives of Lizzie Sancho, daughter of abolitionist, composer, and shop-owner Ignatius Sancho, and Dido Elizabeth Belle, the daughter of an enslaved Black woman and a white British naval captain who grew up in the household of the Earl of Mansfield. The first book in the series, Drama and Danger (2022), is narrated from the point of view of a fictionalized Lizzie Sancho as she and her new friend Dido Belle investigate an accident (or was it?) at a performance of Othello. The second novel, Portraits and Poison (2023), is told from the perspective of Dido Belle and involves the theft of a Sancho-Mansfield family portrait. The novels, which are illustrated by Simone Douglas, are published by Harper Collins in the U.S. and available at major bookstores as well as Amazon.

Image courtesy of Advocate Art

In this interview, author Joanna Brown (alias J.T. Williams) tells us about her story of Lizzie and Belle and her practice-based PhD project, The Listening, for which she is developing a novel telling the stories of enslaved Black women in the British Caribbean, alongside a critical thesis on the challenges, joys, and implications of that creative practice. Her work is driven by three questions: what kind of work do we to do to recover these stories from a fragmented, broken archive? What does it mean to be a Black British woman in the archive doing that work? What role can creative writing and the imagination play in doing that work?

Joanna Brown is a doctoral researcher and visiting tutor in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University, London. Her practice-based PhD project, The Listening, confronts the absence  and elision of Black women’s voices in the slavery archive, with a focus on Britain and the British Caribbean. 

Joanna writes for children under the name J.T. Williams. Her middle-grade historical fiction series, The Lizzie and Belle Mysteries, is based on the lives and world of African Britons in Georgian London. The first novel in the series, Drama and Danger, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize (2023), Foyle’s Children’s Book of the Year (2022) and was recently awarded The Week Junior Book Awards, Breakthrough Children’s Book of the Year, and the Diverse Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year. 

She has just published a collection of biographies for children, illustrated by Angela Vives, Bright Stars of Black British History (Thames & Hudson).