Dudley Writers’ Festival 2pm 3rd June Long Lane Library B62 9JY. Talk: How WWII changed women’s lives forever. Award winning author, Shirley Mann reveals the real women’s stories that inspired her six novels.

Shirley Mann is a BBC journalist who was inspired to write her first novel, Lily’s War by her mother who was a WAAF in Bomber Command. It led to a series of novels that features the lesser-known roles carried out by young women during the Second World War. Her second book, Bobby’s War won the Romantic Saga Novel of the Year Award and her fourth novel, Bridget’s War was nominated for the Popular Fiction Award. Her books feature an ATA pilot who flew more than a hundred different planes, a Land Army girl who survived frost and heatwaves,,,and working alongside German POWs, a policewoman in the Isle of Man internment camp, trying to keep German Jews and German Nazi supporters separate and a girl working the Grand Union Canal, dealing with grime and a ‘bucket and chuck it’ toilet system and Midlands gangs. Her sixth novel, Faith’s War is out in August and features the most dramatic backdrop of all – the siege of Malta, when more bombs were dropped on the tiny island than on London in the Blitz…and they were being starved. Faith has to stay alive while she searches for her birth mother and maybe find love too. Hear the real stories that inspired these books in Shirley’s free talk during the Dudley Writers’ Festival.