Janet Ellis novelist

Interview by Bridget Osborne

September 2015

Janet Ellis, actor and former presenter of children’s TV programme Blue Peter, is an ambassador for the Doorstep Library charity – one of the charities which have benefited from the Chiswick Book festival. She talked to me about what it’s like to volunteer for the charity, which provides books and reads them to primary age children. literally going door to door and knocking to see if they’d like a story.

I spoke to her in 2015, a few months before her first book The Butcher’s Hook was published. The first of a two book deal, its about murder in the eighteenth century. “Probably not the book people would have expected me to write” she said. When it was published, the Guardian wrote: ‘She has a sharp eye and a sharper wit. More importantly still, she possesses a subtle and compassionate understanding of the human heart’.