Felicity Goodall: The life of Suffolk writer & naturalist Mea Allen

Felicity Goodall is a former journalist who worked on regional newspapers before spending several years as a freelance foreign correspondent in Norway.

She has also worked in radio & television, most recently as a BBC Radio 4 producer.

She made the first programme about the life of Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack of Halifax broadcast in 1993 & produced such programmes as Poetry Please! & A Good Read.

She has written 6 books of non-fiction.

These include, We Will Not Go to War, based on interviews with men & women who took a stand against conscription, & Exodus Burma: The British Escape Through the Jungles of Death 1942, which told the story of half a million people who walked from Burma to India when the Japanese invaded.Seeking Mea Allan Fleet Streets Forgotten Pioneer, published by The History Press in July this year, is her first biography.

Mea Allan was a star reporter on Britain's biggest-selling daily paper, the first woman on a Fleet Street news desk & to be permanently accredited to the British Army as a war correspondent, & the only woman to report from newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp & cover the subsequent trials.

She was once so famous that her name was used to advertise Horlicks & yet she has all but disappeared from history.

Seeking Mea Allan interweaves past & present from London to Glasgow, from Paris to Hamburg & beyond, to answer the questions that still linger: was Mea written out of history because of her sexuality? Or was something more subtle at work?Unreserved seating.