Dark Mermaids

Anne Lauppe Dunbar is a creative writing tutor at Swansea University, where she also studied for her PhD. She had a short story published in Sing Sorrow Sorrow (ed Gwen Davies, Seren) and has had stories, essays, papers and poems published with Cinnamon Press, Seventh Quarry and New Welsh Review. She says: ‘I wrote Dark Mermaids as my refugee mother’s daughter: a child of the GDR who fled westwards carrying arcane knowledge of a country in which secrets and lies were endemic.’ In writing the novel Anne has extensively researched what is known of athletes doping and training in the area of East Germany she writes about.