On a remote island off the Irish coast, Catherine Jansen-Ridings found the beginnings of The Shame Child. Before writing the novel, she travelled to an island herself, wanting to understand the physical world her characters would have inhabited — the winds, the wildlife, the sea and the isolation that shape daily life. “It helped to have an actual place to write about,” she says. “It was so helpful to see and feel the winds, the wildlife and the sea. The people who lived there would have spent most of their lives outdoors.”
That sense of immersion runs through the novel, the first instalment in an epic trilogy set in Viking-era Ireland. But while the book contains shipwrecks, invasion and traces of ancient magic, Jansen-Ridings was less interested in violence itself than in what remains after it. Researching Viking expeditions and invasions in Ireland, she became increasingly aware of how often women’s perspectives are absent from these stories. “I realised I wasn’t interested in writing about violence, but about surviving the after effects of violence,” she explains. “I wanted to foreground the women’s experiences and imagine how they might have survived.”
At the centre of the novel is Erronach, a woman haunted by her past and forced to navigate fear, grief and survival as Viking ships arrive on her shores. For Jansen-Ridings, the story became a way of exploring family, forgiveness and the complicated emotional bonds that endure during crisis. “It’s really about family, community, and how people who aren’t the winners can learn to work together and live in a male dominated world,” she says. “It’s about difficult kinds of love — struggling to love your child and learning to love people you thought were your worst enemies.”
Although she admits she “cried a lot” while writing the book because she felt so deeply for the characters, there is one she returns to with particular affection: Fidelm, the family’s healer and caretaker. “She is a rock for her family: cooking, healing, and caring for others,” Jansen-Ridings says. “She is the kind of woman that inspires me.” Yet it is Erronach herself she most closely identifies with: “She’s so gutsy but, at the same time, wounded.”
The roots of The Shame Child stretch back years. While studying Creative Writing as a mature student at Middlesex University, Jansen-Ridings was asked to write an origin story inspired by where she believed she came from. Research into her own Irish family history, combined with an interest in Viking history sparked while her husband was working on a Viking film, slowly evolved into the world of the novel. “I started to think about the women and children that were left behind after the long ships sailed away,” she says.
For all its darkness, however, the novel ultimately reaches towards hope. Jansen-Ridings describes wanting to write “a stirring, emotional, historical-adventure-romance” while also exploring “a way in which we can move past the awful things in this world and make a better life for women, children, and all those who are powerless.” Across the trilogy, she says, the women gradually discover “they have strength in numbers.”
“I want people to be swept along by the adventure,” she says, “and finish the trilogy feeling hope that a better, more caring, world is possible.”
CATHERINE JANSEN-RIDINGS started her career as an actor and began writing plays to perform. Stand-up comedy, street theatre, and children’s TV followed, but she wrote through it all. She raised a family, studying for a Creative Writing degree from Middlesex University and home-educating her children. When the chicks flew the nest, she began writing plays for Chickenshed Theatre and wrote and directed her first short film, Josh & Lil. She lives in North London with her husband of forty years, actor Richard Ridings.
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CATHERINE JANSEN-RIDINGS started her career as an actor and began writing plays to perform. Stand-up comedy, street theatre, and children’s TV followed, but she wrote through it all. She raised a family, studying for a Creative Writing degree from Middlesex University and home-educating her children. When the chicks flew the nest, she began writing plays for Chickenshed Theatre and wrote and directed her first short film, Josh & Lil. She lives in North London with her husband of forty years, actor Richard Ridings.
