Rebecca Loncraine (Estate Of)

Rebecca Loncraine was born in England and grew up on a hill farm in the Black Mountains of Wales. After attending art school, she studied history and literature, and wrote a doctorate in English literature at Oxford University. A career as a freelance writer followed, with Beccy writing for the national press.

Research for her first book, The Real Wizard Of Oz: The Life And Times Of L. Frank Baum (Gotham Books, 2009) was funded by fellowship grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.

Beccy died of cancer in 2016, leaving the typescript of her memoir, Skybound, as a work-in-progress. Skybound tells of Beccy’s life-changing and post-cancer healing-experience of learning to fly gliders in the Black Mountains of Wales and in New Zealand – a story of travel, survival, love and flying; where Eat, Pray, Love meets Jay Griffiths’s Wild.

Thanks to a thoughtful and emotional collaboration between Beccy’s remarkable parents Trisha & Tony, and her editor Sophie Jonathan, the book has been completed from the partial typescript and the notes and draft pages which Beccy left. It was published posthumously in 2018 by Picador.