‘ Daisy Belle is a love letter to a forgotten golden age of swimming…Davies has a beautiful turn of phrase. To read her descriptions of water and its locations is transportive – here, you can smell the piping, hear the echo over shiny tiles and feel the warmth of the Lambeth baths; there, feel […]

  The Independent Monitor, the magazine for the Association of Independent Monitoring Boards in prisons, has reviewed Bad Girls in its October issue. ‘Caitlin Davies sets out a compelling study into the women who were held in Holloway, using individual case studies to highlight sometimes appalling miscarriages of justice and vividly illustrate what life was […]

  The award winning author Sheena Wilkinson, described by the Irish Times as ‘one of our foremost writers for young people’, has written a review of Bad Girls for the Writers Review. The book raises important questions about what constitutes crime and punishment and the extent to which this is determined by changing social mores…It […]

In 1927, Mercedes Gleitze became the first British woman to swim the English Channel. Now her daughter Doloranda Pember has written the first biography of this incredible swimmer. I first met Doloranda when I interviewed her for Downstream, and can’t wait to read In the Wake of Mercedes Gleitze, published by The History Press on […]

  This month’s Outdoor Swimmer Magazine features Daisy Belle and a chat with Ella Foote about the women and ponds that inspired the novel. ‘Fans of the film The Greatest Showman may enjoy the read as there are similarities: the desire for success, money and the drive to perform. Daisy Belle has the passion, greed […]

The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest online news site, has chosen Bad Girls as one of five new books that ‘upend traditional views about women’. ‘The bad girls of the title are women who were jailed for drunkenness, prostitution, being suffragettes, murder, theft, performing abortions – indeed the full monty of activities that society frowns on…This […]

I joined the Portobello Book Blog to answer questions about Daisy Belle and the writing life and Laura Morningstar for a Meet the Author Q&A

Daisy Belle was inspired by two forgotten Victorian champions – Agnes Beckwith and Annie Luker. Here’s a guest post on Novel Deelights.  

‘Black women were disproportionately jailed and mistreated in London’s infamous Holloway Prison’ – openDemocracy, the independent global media platform, has run an extract from Bad Girls, taken from a chapter on racism within the prison service. The extract can be read here.  

‘A biography of a prison over its lifetime, adding to the few single study accounts that we have of British penal institutions. Davies…focuses unapologetically on the inmates’ stories, and gives us an insight into the processes of her research, recounting visits to the prison, crime scenes, and burial places. All this makes Bad Girls an […]

The new books magazine Strong Words has run an interview on the background to Daisy Belle: Swimming Champion of the World. Questions covered a passion for swimming and what inspired my other swimming books. ‘(She) has the uncanny knack of discovering fascinating stories that have often, up until she finds them, been somewhat overlooked.’   […]

  Islington Museum will be putting on an exhibition about Holloway Prison, with a focus on ‘the voices which remain unknown and unrecorded.’ This week I joined some of the volunteers to discuss the chronology of Holloway Prison and the themes that come up over and over again during its 164-year history. The museum has […]

June 12th Last night was press night at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, London, for a new production of Machinal, the 1928 play written by American journalist and playwright Sophie Treadwell. It was inspired by the case of Ruth Snyder, executed by electric chair that same year, after she’d been found guilty of killing her […]

‘A highly readable history…As the group Reclaim Holloway campaigns for the (prison) site to include a Women’s Building to help the community, Davies provides a sympathetic feminist reading of female incarceration by men who could not control them’ – Julie Peakman, Who Do You Think You Are Magazine

The Jewish Chronicle has run an extract from Bad Girls, from one of the chapters about Holloway Prison during World War Two. This was the time when 3600 Jewish refugees were jailed, on the way to internment on the Isle of Man. Their ‘crime’ was to be an ‘enemy alien’.  

‘What your favorite authors are reading this summer’ – The Washington Post asked 11 writers what books they will be reading this summer. Ruth Ware, the bestselling psychological crime thriller author, chose Bad Girls.  

  ‘Bad Girls offers many great tales of those who called the now-closed Holloway prison their home…and Caitlin Davies delves into every conceivable story.For those living in the shadow of Islington’s Holloway prison the imagination has run wild for years, concocting images of terrible conditions. Caitlin offers a comprehensive and much-needed answer. The study of […]