Penny Rudge

Penny Rudge’s blackly comic first novel Foolish Lessons in Life and Love, published by Little, Brown, is set in contemporary London, where 23-year-old Taras Krohe is wedged between the two women in his life: Katya, his Russian girlfriend, who is struggling to fund her way through college, and Mami, his overbearing Bukovinian mother. Bumbling through the conflict this produces with increasing desperation, Taras finds it harder and harder to hold on to his image of himself as the good guy.

Penny is working on her second novel, Kindness is a Language, a love story about a deafblind girl thrown into contact with the three boys from a neighbouring family, thus discovering what’s different about the way she experiences the world.