About Angela Fitch

Angela Fitch has always enjoyed writing and for many years has contributed copy to local and regional media but it wasn't until 2014 when she broke her leg and was forced to sit down and put her feet up that she found  time to write for pleasure.

Angela's career in writing fiction started life with a local short story writing competition. Her story was short listed and made it into the anthology. The following year, you really can't write comedy like this, she broke a bone in her foot and spent a couple of weeks keeping the leg up. Again, entered a short story competition, was short listed and once more made it into the anthology. 

Of course, she couldn't rely on the continuation of broken bones to give her time off work to write, so in 2016 Angela took the almost impossible step of quitting the day job to concentrate on her writing along with other interests including travel and photography before, she says, her hips and knees gave out on her! And it was on one of these incredible trips that Angela made that she started to pull together the very first threads of an idea that would become The Phoenix Tree.

It was Botswana, 2018, a magical place with incredible views, wonderful people and wild animals that we usually see only in documentaries that kick started her creativity. A handful of names, a smattering of dates and a range of detailed descriptions were scribbled into a notebook. Angela spent the next few months developing plot lines and characters, checking facts and timelines. something that Angela hadn't reckoned on was that every time she pictured her main character, Connie, she saw a young version of her paternal grandmother. She can't explain why this happened, but felt that as her grandmother had been a very precious person to her then maybe she should go with it and that's how Connie Heritage became a very real part of the fiction.

By 2021 those early scribblings had become a fully fledged manuscript, now it was ready for the final proofreading followed by the tricky task of securing an agent and publisher. Well, that was the plan, but contracts with literary agents are as rare as hen's teeth and publishers about the same. After many submissions and  subsequent rejections Angela decided to self-publish, which wasn't as easy as it might have been, but not impossible, which leads us to today's version of her debut novel The Phoenix Tree, available directly from the author or as a digital download and  paperback from Amazon.